The main objective of this research are the flying apsaras in the grottoes of the Northern Wei Dynasty, focusing on the three main royal grottoes, Yungang Grottoes, Longmen Grottoes and Gongyi ...read more
The Indian Sufi romances (premākhyāns), written in the Avadhi language by poets with Muslim origins, are mystical narratives that have circulated across South Asia, defying literary genres and linguistic barriers. ...read more
This project aims at documenting the endangered BIYO language (Hani group of the Lolo-Burmese language family), spoken by ethnic minorities in scattered locations of Southwestern Yunnan Province of China. Nowadays, ...read more
The research object of the project consists of the Dunhuang documents related to the planetary deities and the belief in the planetary deities in the Dunhuang area in Medieval China. ...read more
Proceeding from the maxim that 'nothing can be understood apart from context', this research projects seeks to do that which is rarely done in the study of Buddhist literature. It ...read more
Combining intellectual history with material philology, this project studies the authority attributed to histories in Syriac excerpt collections (6-10th c). It uses unstudied material to analyse the intertwining of identity ...read more
The scope of this project revolves around a close study of the Dīrghāgama manuscript (The Collection of Long Discourses), an important collection of Buddhist sūtras detailing the discourses of the ...read more
This project examines the diverse representations of early Judaism across the German-speaking lands of the 19th century. In view of the rising nation-state, it illuminates the importance of the ancient past ...read more
The purpose of this project is to perform a semantic and etymological study of the Greek verb ἀραρίσκω ‘to adapt’ and its cognates. The origin of the word, i.e. its ...read more