Editorial Team

Dermot Killingley is a Visiting Fellow of Newcastle University and a Senior Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. He taught Sanskrit and Indian culture in the Department of Indian Studies, University of Malaya, from 1961 to 1968. He taught Indian religions in the Department of Religious Studies, Newcastle University, from 1970 to 2000, when he retired as Reader in Hindu Studies. In 2008 he taught in the University of Vienna as Visiting Professor. He has published research on aspects of ancient Indian thought, and on modern developments, particularly Rammohun Roy, Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan. His books include Rammohun Roy in Hindu and Christian Tradition (1993), and a three-volume teaching course, Beginning Sanskrit.

Anna King is Professor of Religious Studies and Social Anthropology at the University of Winchester. She has carried out fieldwork in India and Nepal on many occasions. Before joining the University of Winchester in 1992, she taught at Cambridge University. Since 2011 she has been director of research within Winchester’s Centre for Religion, Reconciliation and Peace. She has collaborated in major research projects with international and local partners in South and South-East Asia. She became convenor of the Spalding Symposium in 1998, founder of RoSA in 2007 and a Trustee of the Spalding Trust in 2018. She has edited two volumes of the Spalding Symposium’s papers (one co-edited with John Brockington). She now writes on religion’s role as a source of conflict and a force in peacemaking and publishes research on aspects of contemporary Hinduism.

Dr Karen O’Brien-Kop is Lecturer in Modern Asian Religions at King’s College London. She researches Buddhist and Hindu Sanskrit texts and culture on meditation, philosophy of mind, and mind-body practices. She also has interests in theory and method in religion and philosophy. She has published a monograph, Rethinking ‘Classical Yoga’ and Buddhism: Meditation, Metaphors and Materiality (Bloomsbury, 2021), and co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies (2020, with Suzanne Newcombe). Her PhD was undertaken at SOAS University of London, where she previously worked. Karen is co-chair of the Spalding Symposium on Indian Religions, and of the Indian and Chinese Religions Compared Unit at the American Academy of Religion.

Simon Brodbeck is a Reader in Religious Studies at Cardiff University, where he has worked since 2008. Before that, he was a researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (2004–2007) and a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh (2002–2004). He specialises in the study of Sanskrit narrative literature. His books include Gender and Narrative in the Mahābhārata (co-edited with Brian Black, Routledge, 2007), The Mahābhārata Patriline: Gender, Culture, and the Royal Hereditary (Ashgate, 2009), and Krishna’s Lineage: the Harivamsha of Vyāsa’s Mahābhārata, Translated from the Sanskrit (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Suzanne Newcombe is a Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University and the Honorary Director of Inform, based in Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London. She has broad and active research interests in the sociology and social history of religion (broadly understood) and extensive specialist knowledge in new and minority South Asian religious movements in global contexts. She has published extensively on the development of yoga in the modern period; most notably her monograph on Yoga in Britain (Equinox, 2019) and the Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies (co-edited with Karen O’Brien-Kop, 2021).