Jörg Gengnagel is Professor and head of the Department of Indology at the Institute for Cultural Studies of East and South Asia at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. He is a founding member of the India Competence Centre at Würzburg University. Prior to joining Würzburg University in 2017 he was a member and project leader of the collaborative research center (Sonderforschungsbereich) “Ritual Dynamics” at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University and co-directed a project on waterscapes at the inter-disciplinary research group “Waterscapes in Transcultural Perspectives” at the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context”.
Among his fields of interest are medieval Shaivism, the religious topography of Varanasi, and the relation of spatial texts, cartography, and ritual performances in South Asia. He has published on the religious cartography of Varanasi (“Visualized Texts” 2011) as well as studies on court ritual in Rajasthan. Until 2023 he was head of the DAAD funded Indo-German project on “Cultures of Learning in Varanasi” (A New Passage to India).
During the main phase of ICAS:MP Prof. Gengnagel was a member of the Joint committee as well as module coordinator of the module “The Challenge of Gender”, continued as a Thematic Consolidation Group in the phase 2024-27. Since 2020 he is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies, New Delhi.
From July 2024 until June 2026 Prof. Gengnagel will take over the position of German director of the consortium ICAS:MP.
