Founder & Managing Editor

Dr. Urmila Mohan

Urmila Mohan (Ph.D., Anthropology/Material and Visual Culture, University College London, 2015) is a leading public-facing anthropologist, editor, and publisher who studies embodiment, materials, and religion/belief. Dr. Mohan founded the digital, open-access platform The Jugaad Project in 2019 to enhance the anthropological and inter-disciplinary study of material culture and embodiment via belief practices, and is a member of the Matière à Penser network for bodily-and-material studies. (Prior to this she co-founded the Material Religions blog in 2014.) She is a 2024-25 Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellow, taught museum anthropology at New York University, and is Honorary Research Fellow, Dept. of Anthropology, University College London. She earned an MFA in Studio Art (Penn. State Univ., 2009), a BA Hons in Anthropology (Victoria Univ. of Wellington, 2000), and a BFA in Communication Design (National Institute of Design, SLPEP, 1998).

Dr. Mohan’s research has been supported by the Fulbright Program; Asian Cultural Council, New York; Nehru Trust for the Indian Collections, Victoria & Albert Museum, London; and The Rotary Foundation International. Her research includes an ethnography of Hindu devotees who make garments for their deities and also wear specific clothing (Clothing as Devotion in Contemporary Hinduism 2019/2024), a curatorial study of Balinese ritual textiles at the American Museum of Natural History, NY (Fabricating Power with Balinese Textiles 2018), and an examination of designers and costumers sewing masks to protect fellow citizens during COVID-19 (Masking in Pandemic U.S.: Beliefs and Practices of Containment and Connection 2023).

She has written extensively on the efficacy and subject/object-making capacities of practices and theorizes their materiality in her latest edited volume The Efficacy of Intimacy and Belief in Worldmaking Practices (2024), based on The Jugaad Project workshops, having previously co-edited other important works in this area (Marching the Devotional Subject: The Bodily-and-Material Cultures of Religion 2017; The Material Subject: Rethinking Bodies and Objects in Motion 2021).

Academia page. editor@thejugaadproject.pub

Hear Urmila discuss the bodily-and-material approach with Prof. Em. Jean-Pierre Warnier (S1E1) and how convivial scholarship works in an incomplete world with Prof. Francis B. Nyamnjoh (S2E1) on the Embodied Worlds podcast.

Editorial Project Manager & Content Coordinator

Dr. Emily Levick

Emily Levick (Ph.D., Museum Studies, University of Leicester, 2024) is a highly qualified museum professional with experience in exhibition production and management, interpretation development, resource management, and community and stakeholder liaison. Her doctoral thesis, “Feminine Fabrications: Textiles and the Representation of Women in Museums” is focused on the display and interpretation of textiles, and how these are used in museums to represent women’s histories and experiences. Prior to this, Dr. Levick also earned an MA in Museum Studies, University of Leicester, UK (2020) with a thesis titled "Weaving the World: The Importance of Textiles in Museum Representations of Global History and Culture"; an MA in Classical Studies (2017) from the Open University with a thesis titled “Destiny Looms: The Influence of Women and Weaving on Ancient Greek Society”; and a BA (Hons) in Humanities with English Language and Classical Studies (2014) from the Open University.

Emily has co-ordinated exhibitions on women’s history and meanings of textiles, including A Sense of Place and Time and HERstory: A History of Women Through Objects. At the Milton Keynes Museum (2015-2021), she assisted with developing the Museum’s Strategic Plan, and was a member of the Exhibition Display and Interpretation team. She has been published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America, The Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice, Textile: Cloth and Culture, Museological Review, The Jugaad Project, and The Guardian.

Emily co-edited three of the Jugaad platform’s most recent issues on Textiles, Museums and Work. She is interested in all aspects of textile history and culture; museum representation and interpretation; and gender and women’s studies. (LinkedIn page) eal17@leicester.ac.uk

Hear Emily speak about women’s representation through textiles and interpretation in some major UK museums.

Friends of the Project

(Here we mention only a few people who are associated with us. In addition, there are others who have been authors and podcast guests.)

Simashree Bora (PhD, Jawaharlal Nehru University) is Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Cotton University, Guwahati, Assam. She was an editor-at-large for The Jugaad Project (2020-2024). Her research involves gender studies, sociology of religion, and environmental and ecological studies. Her publications include the chapter “Rituals and Riverine Flows: Negotiating Change in Majuli Island, Assam”, in The Efficacy of Intimacy and Belief in Worldmaking Practices, 2024;  Feminising the Indian Judiciary: The Gender Gap and the Possibilities of Objectivity, 2021; Revisiting the Past and Unveiling the Gendered Legacy: History and Representation of Women in Neo-Vaishnavism in Assam, 2019; Gendered Devotion in Neo-Vaishnavism: Women, Monks and Sattras of Majuli, Assam, 2018; and Recurrence of Neo-Vaishnava Faith: Emergence of Srimanta Sankaradeva Sangha in Assam, 2017. Simashree is keenly interested in gender discourse and Neo-Vaishnavism in Assam. She co-edited our popular issue on Craft. (Academia page)

Siobhan Campbell completed her PhD at the University of Sydney in 2013 investigating the classical painting tradition of Bali and Balinese responses to museum collections. She continued to research collections of Balinese art as a fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in the Netherlands in 2013 and undertook further fieldwork in Bali with a Postdoctoral Endeavour Fellowship in 2014. Siobhan is currently a sessional lecturer in the Department of Indonesian Studies at Sydney University and is a research fellow on the ARC Discovery Project ‘Shaping Indonesian Contemporary Art: The Role of Institutions’.

Simon Coleman obtained his undergraduate degree and PhD from the University of Cambridge. He is Chancellor Jackman Professor in the Arts at the University of Toronto. Simon was President, Society for the Anthropology of Religion, from 2017-19. He is co-editor of the journal Religion and Society: Advances in Research and of the book series Routledge Studies in Pilgrimage, Religious Travel and Tourism. He has carried out fieldwork in Sweden, the United Kingdom and Nigeria. With Rosalind Hackett, he edited The Anthropology of Global Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism (New York University Press, 2015) and his book Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Motion was also published by NYU Press, 2022.

David Morgan (PhD, Art History, University of Chicago, 1990) is Professor of Religious Studies with a secondary appointment in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. He chaired the Department of Religious Studies from 2013 to 2019. He has published several books and dozens of essays on the history of religious visual culture, on art history and critical theory, and on religion and media. Publications include: Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment, The Forge of Vision: A Visual History of Modern Christianity, and The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling.

Christopher Pinney (PhD, Social Anthropology, London School of Economics, 1987) is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at the Department of Anthropology, University College London. His research has a strong geographic focus in central India, including an earlier emphasis on village-resident factory workers. Subsequently, he has researched popular photographic practices and the consumption of Hindu chromolithographs in the same area. His publications include Camera Indica, Photos of the Gods, and The Coming of Photography in India.

Anissa Rahadiningtyas (PhD, History of Art and Visual Studies, Cornell University) is an art historian currently working as a Curator of Islamic aesthetics in modern and contemporary Southeast Asia at the National Gallery of Singapore. She was an editor-at-large for The Jugaad Project (2024) and has been associated with the platform since 2022. Her research interests include comparative modernisms, Indian Ocean studies, postcolonial and decolonial theories, gender and feminism, environmentalism and Islamic studies. Her most recent curatorial projects include The Neglected Dimension, National Gallery of Singapore (2023), and Re-Collecting Southeast Asia at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum. Anissa’s’ recent publications include Rethinking the Modern and the Islamic through Hindu Forms in Haryadi Suadi and Arahmaiani’s Works, in ‘Performing Prowess: Essays on Localized Hindu Influences in Southeast Asian Art’ (Open Access), edited by Wannasarn Noonsuk, California State University, Fresno (2022), and "Arahmaiani: Nomadic Reparation Projects, Environmentalism, and Global Islam" for Post: Notes on Art in Global Context.

Jean-Pierre Warnier (PhD, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, 1975) is Honorary Professor at the Institut des Mondes Africains, Paris. He taught anthropology in Nigeria, Cameroon, and, since 1985, at the University of Paris-Descartes. Since 1972, he has researched the economic and political history of the Cameroon Grassfields, later shifting to the study of bodily and material cultures as technologies of power. As a core member of the Matière à Penser (MaP) research group, he contributed to its theoretical approach to material culture. His English publications include The Pot King: The Body and Technologies of Power, "Technology as Efficacious Action on Objects...and Subjects", and “Marching the Devotional Subject”.

Rose Wellman is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, and Associate Director, Center for Arab American Studies, at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, specializing in Iran, the Middle East, and its diaspora. Her book, Feeding Iran: Shi’i Families and the Making of an Islamic Republic, draws from ethnographic research in Iran (2007-2010) to explore how everyday family life and piety are linked to state power. Wellman’s work contributes to the study of kinship and relatedness, Islam, material religion, food, and nation-making. She is currently conducting research on Arab Americans in metro Detroit, focusing on the region’s vibrant Shi’i Iraqi community.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

John J. McGraw

John J. McGraw (1974-2016) was the Co-Founder of the Material Religions blog. He worked at CSU Northridge as an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Religious Studies and Central American Studies. He studied cognitive anthropology at UCSD and his doctoral research (2007-2015) investigated the rituals of the highland Maya of Guatemala, particularly the Tz'utujil. From 2011-2014 he was employed as a TESIS Research Fellow based in Denmark at Aarhus University's Interacting Minds Centre. Academia Page.