Founder & Managing Editor

Urmila Mohan

Urmila Mohan is a leading public-facing anthropologist of material culture with a focus on textiles and religion/belief. Dr. Mohan founded the digital, open-access publication The Jugaad Project in 2019 to enhance the anthropology of material culture and embodiment via belief practices, and is a member of the Matière à Penser network for bodily-and-material studies. 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 (PhD, 2015). She earned an MFA in Studio Art (Penn. State Univ., 2009), a BA Hons in Anthropology (Victoria Univ. of Wellington, 2000), and BFA in Communication Design (National Institute of Design, 1998).

Dr. Mohan’s research is/has been supported by Asian Cultural Council of New York, Nehru Trust for the Indian Collections at the V&A, the Rotary Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. 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 (many influenced by Indian trade textiles) at the American Museum of Natural History, NY, and an examination of designers 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 material practices and theorizes their study 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). Academia page. editor@thejugaadproject.pub

Hear Urmila discuss the bodily-and-material approach with Prof. Em. Jean-Pierre Warnier on the new Embodied Worlds podcast, and speak with Garland Magazine’s The Loop.

Contributing Editor

Emily Levick

Emily Levick [PhD, Museum Studies, University of Leicester, UK (anticipated 2024); MA, Museum Studies, University of Leicester, UK (2020); MA Classical Studies (2017); BA (Hons) Humanities, English Language and Classical Studies (2014)] is interested in representations of femininity through textiles in museum displays, and themes of gender and care. She co-edited two of the Jugaad platform’s most popular issues on Museums and Work and is currently producing a curated issue on Dress.

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. She has been published in Museological Review, Textile: Cloth and Culture, and The Jugaad Project. At the Milton Keynes Museum (2015-2020), she assisted with developing the Museum’s Strategic Plan, and was a member of the Exhibition Display and Interpretation team. Emily 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

Editors-at-Large

Simashree Bora

Simashree Bora (PhD, Jawaharlal Nehru University) is Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Cotton University, Guwahati, Assam. Her research involves gender studies, sociology of religion, and environmental and ecological studies. Her publications include 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 edited our popular issue on Craft. (Academia page)

Emma Cieslik

Emma Cieslik [MA, Museum Studies (2023); B.A. Public History and Biology (2021)] is a museum professional, religious ethnographer, and public historian, who has worked in curatorial, collections management, and education capacities for over five years. She initiated and co-hosts the Embodied Worlds podcast.

Emma has also conducted ethnographic, archival, and oral historical research in American religious and LGBTQIA+ communities. She is passionate about researching, curating, and managing collections of material culture, specifically material religion, in museums as well as celebrating museums as spaces of intercultural discovery, accessibility, and communication. Her work has been published in Contemporary Jewry, The International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society, Feminist Studies in Religion, Nursing Clio, Archer, Teen Vogue, Killing the Buddha, Religion & Politics, Religion Dispatches, The Art Newspaper, and The Revealer. (Google Scholar page)

Anissa Rahadiningtyas

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. 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.

Friends of the Project

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.

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.

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”.

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.