KHK Visiting Research Fellow 2018
Professor of Indian Studies at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland

Angelika Malinar studied Indology and Philosophy in Tubingen. Her Ph.D. dissertation on the Bhagavadgītā, was published in 1996 and appeared in a thoroughly revised English version in 2007 (The Bhagavadgītā: Doctrines and Contexts, Cambridge University Press). Here the whole text is analysed and the teachings formulated therein are placed in their historical context.

From 1992-1998 she was a research assistant at the Seminar for Indology and Comparative Religious Studies in Tubingen. In 1998 she gained her Habilitation with a study on the concept of nature in Indian philosophy. From 1999 she was involved in the interdisciplinary DFG-focus program “Contested Centers: Construction and Change in Social-cultural Identities in the Indian Region Orissa”. In her research project, she dealt with the history and contemporary situation of the monastic institutions of a Hindu religious community in Orissa (Caitanya Tradition). From 2000 she was active as a university lecturer at the Institute for Indian Philology and Art History at the Free University Berlin. In 2005, she became a senior lecturer at the Department for the Study of Religions, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Since 2009 she has been full professor of Indian Studies at the University of Zurich, where she has been engaged in the University Research Priority Program (URPP) “Asia and Europe”, amongst other things. She is a co-editor of the Handbuch der Orientalistik and the multi-volume Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism.

Her broad range of research interests include the focus on Hinduism in history and present, Indian philosophy und aesthetics, Sanskrit literature (especially Epos und Purana), modern Hinduism- and Oriya literature, as well as the tradeoffs between India and Europe in Modernity.

Education

• Habilitation, Indology at University of Tübingen, 1998
• Ph.D., Indology and Philosophy, Universität Tübingen, 1991
• M.A., Indology and Philosophy, University of Tübingen, 1989

KHK Fellowship

Duration: September 2018 - January 2019
Project: Debating Authorities. Gender and the Interpretation of Religion(s) in Colonial India