- Professor Diwakar Acharya, Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at the University of Oxford, is a leading authority on Sanskrit and South Asian history, languages and culture. Prof. Acharya has worked extensively on early Nepalese manuscripts and has himself published important critical editions. During a period when he worked on the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project, based at the University of Hamburg and at the National Archives in Kathmandu, he was part of the team that discovered the manuscripts on which this project is based.
- Dr Madhu K. Paramesvaran is experienced in manuscript research and editing practice and is strongly networked with traditional south-Indian families of hereditary physicians. It is in south India, and especially Kerala, where Dr Madhu lives, that the living traditions of early Ayurvedic practice are most strongly preserved in hereditary familes of physicians. Dr Madhu provides the project with an important footprint in India. As an experienced physician and scholar of Sanskrit himself, he is in a position to aid the project with the interpretation of medical knowledge when the textual descriptions need to be clarified against transmitted traditional practice. Dr Madhu is an Assistant Professor at the VPS Varier Ayurveda College, Kottakkal.
- Prof. Alessandro Graheli has deep experience with Indian manuscripts and is an international expert in the subtleties of textual criticism and the editing of Sanskrit works from manuscript. His edition of the philosophical work of Jayanta Bhaṭṭa contains an introduction that lays out the editorial practices that will be applied in our project. In particular, Dr Graheli discusses the application of cladistic analysis to manuscript stemmata and raises important questions and insights into the practical use of these novel methodologies. Prof Graheli advises the project on both technical and interpretative questions.
- Prof. Kengo Harimoto is one of the few scholars to have published analytic research about the Nepalese manuscripts of the Suśrutasaṃhitā. Prof. Harimoto is an experienced text-historical scholar with numerous landmark publications in the area of textual criticism and the evaluation of medieval Sanskrit commentarial literature. Prof. Harimoto’s published studies of the Nepalese manuscripts of the SS cover both text-historical enquiries as well as higher critical studies concerning the newly-revealed content of the SS in the early manuscript transmission.
*The SSHRC offers this formal definition of a project collaborator.