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Date
Time
7:00 pm to 8:30 pm
Venue
SOAS University of London
Room
Khalili Lecture Theatre
Event type
Lecture

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The SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies is thrilled to announce a special project launch event with three of the MANTRAMS Principal Investigators.

Everyday, tens of millions of people use mantras—sacred utterances, formulas, and powerful syllables—in ritual, meditation, yoga, and healing. Articulated in Sanskrit and other Asian languages, mantras originated in the religious traditions of early India and then spread via practitioners, inscriptions, manuscripts, and iconography throughout Asia and around the world. 

While speech and sound are central to mantra practices, mantras take a range of material forms: they may be chanted aloud, contemplated in silence, inscribed on surfaces, written in manuscripts, printed on posters, visually encoded in diagrams, or worn as amulets and textiles; mantras also circulate widely online and in digital media.

Funded by a Synergy Grant from the European Research Council, “Mantras in Religion, Media, and Society in Global Southern Asia” (MANTRAMS) is a pioneering, large-scale research project entirely dedicated to mantras, past and present. Radically interdisciplinary and comparative, the project will produce a history and anthropology of mantras, including extensive sonic, textual, and visual archives. 

The team will investigate mantras across millennia and around the world, examining the roots of mantra in the religions of the Indian subcontinent, their circulation across South and Southeast Asia, and their transcultural significance in global spiritualities today.

In this talk, the three principal investigators, Carola Lorea, Finnian Gerety, and Borayin Larios, will introduce the project and present concrete examples of mantra practices studied within their respective research. These include the sound efficacy of mantras, ancient Sanskrit conceptualizations of mantra power, their material presence in inscriptions and amulets, and their evolving role in digital spaces, yoga communities, and diasporic religious practices.

By integrating diverse methodologies and creating sonic, visual, and digital archives, the MANTRAMS project advances a new understanding of mantras as multisensory, transregional phenomena. Join us to explore how mantras shape religious and cultural landscapes from ancient times to the present.

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Carola E. Lorea, co-Principal Investigator, MANTRAMS

Carola Lorea holds the Junior Professorship “Rethinking Global Religion” at the University of Tübingen. She works on sound, oral traditions and popular religious movements in South Asia, particularly eastern India, Bangladesh and the Andaman Islands. 

Her research foregrounds the gendered body sensorium for the study of folklore, esoteric movements, Dalit religions and Tantric traditions. Within MANTRAMS, she leads Task Force 2 on sonic efficacy to explore the intersection of sound, religion, and media, examining how mantras’ sonic dimensions are embedded in their social and cultural contexts.

Finn Moore Gerety, co-Principal Investigator, MANTRAMS

Finn Moore Gerety is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Asian Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford and Research Fellow at Harris-Manchester College. He leads MANTRAMS Task Force 1, “Roots and Branches: Emergence and Circulation of Mantras,” which investigates the historical and textual foundations of mantras, focusing on their evolution and transmission within South Asian religious traditions. 

His research spans the history of South Asian religions, Vedic texts and rituals, contemporary Hinduism in South India, mantra studies, yoga studies, and sound studies. Dr. Gerety’s work examines how mantras navigate between historical contexts and contemporary practices, contributing to the project’s exploration of mantras’ material, sonic, and relational dimensions.

Borayin Larios, corresponding Principal Investigator, MANTRAMS

Ass-Prof. Borayin Larios is a Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Vienna. He leads Task Force 3 on the materiality of mantras, focusing on their visual, embodied, and digital forms across South Asia. His team’s research examines mantra-inscribed objects, their commodification, and their role in digital spaces. 

Drawing on fieldwork in Mumbai and Pune and digital ethnography, Dr. Larios explores the intersection of mantras, media, and their broader roles in religion and society. As part of his involvement in the task force, he oversees the project’s exhibition, which will share key findings and offer an insightful exploration of the material culture of mantras, showcasing their tangible expressions and significance.

MANTRAMS Principal Investigators

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