Notes on the Contributors
Francis X. Clooney, S.J.
is Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology at Harvard Divinity School. His primary areas of Indological scholarship are theological commentarial writings in the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions of Hindu India, and he is a leading figure globally in the developing field of comparative theology. He has written on the Jesuit missionary tradition, particularly in India, on the early Jesuit pan-Asian discourse on reincarnation, and the methods and ideas of Roberto Nobili, the pioneering Jesuit scholar in seventeenth-century Tamil South India. His most recent book is Saint Joseph in South India: Poetry, Mission, and Theology in Costanzo Gioseffo Beschiâs TÄmpÄvaá¹i (2022).
Fayaz A. Dar
is Assistant Professor of History in the Department of Higher Education of Jammu and Kashmir. His academic and research interests include the medieval history and history of Islam in Kashmir, with a special focus on the history of the Sufi movement, the Rishi Silsila, and its founder Shaikhul Aalam (
Antonio De Caro
(Ph.D. Hong Kong Baptist University, Religion and Philosophy, 2019) is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Art History, University of Zurich, where he pursues research on the representations of St Francis Xavier in Asia for the âGlobal Economies of Salvation: Art and the Negotiation of Sanctity in the Early Modern Periodâ (GLOBECOSAL) project. His monograph, Angelo Zottoli: A Jesuit Missionary in China (1848â1902), appeared in 2022. He works on the history of Christianity in China, in particular, the popularisation, diffusion, and reception of Catholic art in China during the early modern era.
Michiko Fukaya
(Ph.D. Kyoto University, History of Art, 2005), Associate Professor at Kyoto City University of Arts, formerly Associate Professor at Onomichi City University, has researched seventeenth-century Netherlandish painting, art theory, and artistic exchange between the East and the West. Her publications include: Karel van Manderâs Lives of Netherlandish and German Painters: An Annotated Translation (
Kayo Hirakawa
began her academic career as Lecturer in the Faculty of Letters, Kindai University, Osaka, and is currently Professor in the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University. She has published her Ph.D. dissertation, The Pictorialization of Dürerâs Drawings in Northern Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (2009), and articles on other aspects of Northern Renaissance art, as well as on cultural exchange between Italian and Northern European art in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She is the editor of the inaugural volume of the Kyoto Studies in Art History, Sacred and Profane in Early Modern Art (2016), and the posthumous publication of T. Nakamura, Inspiration and Emulation: Selected Studies on Rubens and Rembrandt (2019). Her research on the origins and development of oil painting on copper in early modern Europe continues.
René B. Javellana, S.J.
is Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Arts and Lecturer in Ecclesiastical History in Loyola School of Theology at Ateneo de Manila University. He is Archivist at the Archives of the Philippine Province of the Society of Jesus and a trustee of the National Museum of the Philippines. His interests reside in colonialism and the hybrid baroque, especially in its Spanish and Mexican strains, and the media and public projection of art. He wrote Weaving Cultures: The Invention of Colonial Art and Culture in the Philippines, 1865â1850 (2017), and he was a major contributor to, and area editor of, The Cultural Center of the Philippines: Encyclopedia of Philippine Art, vol. 3: Architecture (1994, rev. ed. 2017).
Emy Merin Joy
is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Medieval Studies at the Central European University, Vienna, and Research Fellow at the Centrum für Religionswissenschaftliche Studien (CERES), Ruhr University, Bochum. Her research focuses on early modern Syrian Christian Church manuscripts in the vernacular (Garshuni Malayalam) and Syriac. Her doctoral project is entitled âThe Paravur Dialogues: Exploring an Interreligious Dialogue in a Garṣūá¹i Malayalam Manuscript from Early Modern South Indiaâ; it explores the historical, socio-cultural, literary, and theological aspects of the first interreligious dialogues in Malayalam.
Zubair Khalid
is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His dissertation, âState and Polity in the Textual and Material Culture of Medieval Kashmir (1339â1586)â, focuses on the regionâs textual and material cultures under the rule of Kashmiri sultans between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. His interests include the history of Islam, with particular attention to Sufism, and the intellectual and material networks of Kashmir. | ORCID: 0009-0003-8710-5197
Edith Llamas Camacho
is Lecturer at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), where she specialises in the early modern circulation of objects and the local dimensions of the global transfer of knowledge through critical heritage studies of the Jesuit missions. She is the author of Esquimales, Kwakiutl, y Hurones: Los indÃgenas de Canadá, Alaska y Groenlandia (2014).
Sidh Losa Mendiratta
(Ph.D. University of Coimbra, Architecture, 2012) is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto. He is Coordinator of the Research Project âID-SCAPES: Building Identityâ and Co-principal Investigator of the Research Project, âPORTofCALL: AfricanâAsianâEuropean Encountersâ, based at the University of Porto. He specialises in the architecture and urbanism of Portuguese influence in South Asia during the early modern period. He is the author of Domus-fortis in Ãquator: A segunda vida da casa-torre de origem Europeia no antigo Estado da Ãndia (2019) and the co-author of The Church and Convent of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Chimbel (with F. Velho, 2021).
D. Max Moerman
is Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures, Barnard College, Columbia University, and Co-Chair of the Columbia University Seminar in Buddhist Studies. His research interests lie in the visual and material culture of premodern Japanese Buddhism. He is the author of The Japanese Buddhist World Map: Religious Vision and the Cartographic Imagination (2022) and Localizing Paradise: Kumano Pilgrimage and the Religious Landscape of Premodern Japan (2004).
Raphaèle Preisinger
(Ph.D. Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, Art History and Media Theory, 2012) is Assistant Professor and Principal Investigator of the research project âGlobal Economies of Salvation: Art and the Negotiation of Sanctity in the Early Modern Periodâ (GLOBECOSAL) at the University of Zurich, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). While her current research centres on the global circulation of images and objects in the early modern period, she also maintains a focus on image and piety in the Middle Ages. Her first book was entitled: Lignum vitae: Zum Verhältnis materieller Bilder und mentaler Bildpraxis im Mittelalter (2014).
Dhruv Raina
was Professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where he taught the history and philosophy of science until 2023. His long engagement with the work of Joseph Needham has produced: Needhamâs Indian Network: The Search for a Home for the History of Science in India (1950â1970) (2015) and Situating the History of Science: Dialogues with Joseph Needham (co-edited with S.I. Habib, 1999). He has also authored Domesticating Modern Science (with S.I. Habib, 2004) and Images and Contexts: The Historiography of Science and Modernity (2003), and co-edited Disciplines and Movements (with H. Harder, 2022) and Social History of Sciences in Colonial India (with S.I. Habib, 2007). His most recent work addresses the contemporary circulation of concepts in the social sciences and the emergence of inter- and transdisciplinary fields of research.
Timon Screech
taught the history of Japanese art at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, before moving to a chair at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken), Kyoto, in 2021. In 2020, he published two monographsâThe Shogunâs Silver Telescope and Tokyo before Tokyoâand his field-defining Obtaining Images appeared in 2011. He is the author of many books on the art and culture of the Edo Period, which have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Polish, including: Sex and the Floating World (1999, rev. ed. 2009) and The Lens within the Heart (1996). He was awarded both the Yamagata BantÅ Prize and the Fukuoka Academic Prize in 2022, and is a Freeman of the City of London and a Fellow of the British Academy.
Nicolas Standaert
is Professor of Sinology at the KU Leuven. His major research interest is the cultural contacts between China and Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and he has led multiple research projects on aspects of rituality, visual culture, historiography, and print culture. He is the author of: The Chinese Gazette in European Sources: Joining the Global Public in the Early and Mid-Qing Dynasty (2022); The Intercultural Weaving of Historical Texts: Chinese and European Stories about Emperor Ku and His Concubines (2016); Chinese Voices in the Rites Controversy: Travelling Books, Community Networks, Intercultural Arguments (2012); The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between China and Europe (2008); An Illustrated Life of Christ Presented to the Chinese Emperor: The History of Jincheng shuxiang (1640) (2007); and Yang Tingyun, Confucian and Christian in Late Ming China: His Life and Thought (1988).
Guillermo Wilde
is Researcher at the Argentinian National Scientific Council and Professor at the Universidad Nacional de San MartÃn. He is a specialist in colonial art and music, ethnohistory, and religious conversion in the Iberian-American frontiers. He is the author of Religión y poder en las misiones guaranÃes (2009), awarded the Premio Iberoamericano Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association, and the editor of the anthology Saberes de la conversión: Jesuitas, indÃgenas e imperios coloniales en las fronteras de la cristiandad (2011).