Anne Koch - The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Cultural and Cognitive Aesthetics of Religion

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Mikael Aktor is Associate Professor at University of Southern Denmark. His research has focused on the study of classical Hindu law (dharmastra) as it pertains to social structure, and on aniconic objects of worship in the Hindu tradition as a topic of material religion. His publications include Social Classes vara and Impurity and Purification auca in Hindu Law (The Oxford History of Hinduism), edited by Patrick Olivelle and Donald R. Davis, Jr. (2018); a thematic issue on Exploring Aniconism in Religion 47 (3), co-edited with Milette Gaifman (2017); and Grasping the Formless in Stones in Aesthetics of Religion, edited by Alexandra Grieser and Jay Johnston (2017).

Stefan Binder is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS) at University of Gttingen, Germany. His research interests include the anthropology of the secular, gender, religion, and media. He is currently working on audiovisual media practices, the aesthetics of time, and masculinities among Shii Muslims in Hyderabad (India). He has also published on subjectivity and the relationship of science and religion in the context of Buddhist meditation practices.

Arianna Borrelli is a historian and philosopher of premodern and modern science working at the Centre for Advanced Study on Media Cultures of Computer Simulation at Leuphana University in Leneburg, Germany (German Research Foundation Project KFOR 1927). The focus of her research is the relationship between scientific knowledge and the strategies employed to communicate it. She published the monograph Aspects of the Astrolabe: Architectonica Ratio in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century Europe (2008), and co-edited with Alexandra Grieser a special issue of Approaching Religion on The Beauty Fallacy: Religion, Science, and the Aesthetics of Knowledge (2017).

Peter J. Brunlein is senior researcher at the University of Gttingen, Germany. He is trained in sociocultural anthropology and the study of religion. His research focuses on religious pluralism in Southeast Asia, Christianity (Western and non-Western), spirits, media, museums, and material religion. He has published Thinking Religion through Things. Reflections on the Material Turn in the Scientific Study of Religion/s in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 28.4/5 (2016), 365399, Passion/Pasyon: Rituale des Schmerzes im europischen und philippinischen Christentum (2010) and (co-edited with Andrea Lauser) Ghost Movies in Southeast Asia and Beyond. Narratives, Cultural Contexts, Audiences (2016).

Alexandra Grieser is Assistant Professor for the Theory of Religion at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Her research focuses on the history and theory of knowledge; European pluralism and the interrelation between religion, science, and art; method, theory and history of the study of religion; and aesthetics of religion. Her most recent publications in the field include a special issue on The Beauty Fallacy: Religion, Science and the Aesthetics of Knowledge in Approaching Religion 7/2 (2017), and (co-edited with Jay Johnston) Aesthetics of Religion: A Connective Concept (2017).

Esther-Maria Guggenmos is Visiting Research Fellow at the KHC Erlangen (www.ikgf.fau.de). She specializes in Chinese Buddhism, aesthetics of religion, and processes of cultural exchange. She is author of Im Netz des Indra together with Annette Wilke, 2008, a study in aesthetics of religion of the Museum of World Religions in Taipei. In I Believe in Buddhism and Travelling (2017), she delivers detailed insight into contemporary lay Buddhism in urban Taiwan. Guggenmos serves as speaker of the working group Aesthetics of Religion in the German Association for the Study of Religions (DVRW).

Adrian Hermann is Full Professor of Religion and Society and Director of the Department of Religion Studies at Forum Internationale Wissenschaft, University of Bonn, Germany. His work focuses on the global history of the concept of religion, the use of non-fictional media in contemporary religious movements, and the religious history of the globalized world. He is the author of Unterscheidungen der Religion (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2015) and is currently working on a monograph on Philippine independent Catholicism around 1900. He teaches classes on visual anthropology and documentary film in the study of religion and in media studies.

Dirk Johannsen is Associate Professor of Cultural History at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS), University of Oslo, Norway. His research focuses on narrative cultures, popular religion in the nineteenth century, cognitive approaches, and trolls. Recent publications include On Elves and Freethinkers: Criticism of Religion and the Emergence of the Literary Fantastic in Nordic Literature, Religion 46/4, 2016, 591610, and The Prophet and the Sorcerer: Becoming a Cunning-Man in Nineteenth-Century Norway, Folklore 129/1, 2018, 3957.

Jay Johnston is an associate professor at the University of Sydney, Australia. Trained in religious studies, continental philosophy, gender studies, art history, Scottish and Nordic studies, her research examines concepts of materiality, embodiment, perception, desire, image agency, magic, and epistemology. Forthcoming in 2020 is Stag and Stone: Religion, Archaeology and Esoteric Aesthetics (Equinox).

Anja Kirsch is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Basel, Switzerland, whose main interest concerns the relation between religion and the secular in contemporary and historical perspective. Recent publications include Weltanschauung als Erzhlkultur, 2016; Religious in Form, Socialist in Content: Socialist Narratives and the Question of Civil Religion, Journal of Religion in Europe 10 (2017), 147171, and Red Catechisms: Socialist Educational Literature and the Demarcation of Religion and Politics in the Early Nineteenth Century, Religion 48/1, 836. In her current project she examines the narrative cultures of secular and religious groups in nineteenth-century European religious history.

Chris Klassen teaches in the Religion and Culture department at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. She received her PhD in Womens Studies from York University, Toronto. She is the author of Religion and Popular Culture: A Cultural Studies Approach (2014) and is currently working on the intersection of comics, nature, religion/spirituality, gender, and disability studies.

Anne Koch is Research Professor in the Study of Religion and Interreligiosity at the Private University College of Education, Linz, Austria. Her focus is on method and theory, religious pluralism, economics of religion and aesthetics of religion/embodied cognition. In the field she recently published (as editor)