Professor Arora is an author of 4 books and edited 13. Among his important publications include Motifs in Indian Mythology, Their Greek and other Parallels (1981), Graeco-Indica (1991), Greeks on India (1996), Yunan Itihas aur Samskriti (in Hindi 2010), and Greek Sources on India. He has contributed nearly 120 articles in various journals. He is founder General Secretary of Indian Society for Greek and Roman Studies and edits its annual journal Yavanika. He was General President UP History Congress (1996–97) and Sectional President (Ancient India) Indian History Congress (2002). As a visiting fellow he has visited U.S., Canada, and several countries in Europe, Asia and Africa. His contribution earned him the most prestigious Greek civilian honour Golden Cross-Order of Honour from the President of Greece (1996). In his honour was published the Felicitation Volume Udayana New Horizons in History Classics, and Intercultural Studies (2006).
Professor Osmund Bopearachchi is the Adjunct Professor of Central and South Asian Art, Archaeology, and Numismatics, University of California, Berkeley and Emeritus Director of Research of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (C.N.R.S.-E.N.S. Paris) and former Visiting Professor and Member of the Doctoral School VI of the Paris IV-Sorbonne University.
Professor Osmund Bopearachchi is a numismatist, historian and archaeologist. He has authored twelve books, edited six books and published 162 research articles in reputed international journals. He has read 91 papers at international colloquia; presented 275 conferences in 80 cities, and has carried out 120 archaeological missions in 24 different countries.
Prof. Bopearachchi currently serves as the director of the Sri Lanka-French Archaeological Mission, and also has launched a joint project with the Department of Near-Eastern Studies of the University of California at Berkeley focusing on Sri Lanka’s role in ancient maritime trade in the Indian Ocean.
He recently published a book on Gandhāran art entitled: “When West Met East: Gandhāran Art Revisted (Manohar, Delhi, 2020) based on a selection of hitherto unknown masterpieces from Gandhāra and Greater Gandhāra dispersed in museums and private collections in Japan, Europe, Canada and United States of America. At present he is working on a new catalogue of Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek Coins.
Prof. Holt (MA, PhD University of Virginia) is one of the world’s leading authorities on Alexander the Great, Hellenistic Asia, and new research methodologies such as Cognitive Numismatics. He has published nine books and over eighty articles in journals such as Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Numismatic Chronicle, Indian Historical Review, Revue Numismatique, Mnemon, Notae Numismaticae, and Ancient Macedonia. Two of his books have been republished in Turkish and Chinese translations. His research has been featured on The History Channel and has frequently been cited in such publications as National Geographic, Smithsonian, BBC Current Affairs, The New Yorker, and The New Republic; he has been interviewed by newspapers around the world. In addition to his large body of academic work, Holt is also a prolific writer for the public, with essays appearing in Newsweek, American Scientist, Archaeology, History Today, Archaeology Odyssey, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Saudi Aramco World, and other widely read publications.
Prof. Holt has twice received the University Teaching Excellence Award, as well as the CLASS Master Teacher Award and numerous other classroom honors. In 2011 he was awarded the university’s first Distinguished Leadership in Teaching Excellence Award. Dr. Holt’s undergraduate and graduate courses include The Study of Early Civilizations, Greek History, Alexander the Great, Hellenistic History, and Numismatics.
Prof. Holt has devoted much of his career to two great frontiers, one of subject matter and the other of methodology. In subject matter, his work pushes far beyond the familiar centers of classical culture such as Athens and Rome to explore the vigorous multi-cultural edges of ancient civilizations in places such as Afghanistan. He has achieved this by developing innovative numismatic methodologies, now called the new frontier of Ancient Studies, to write histories where traditional literary sources do not survive. This research has earned several awards, including the Aristotle Prize from Greece and the Craddock prize. His has been an Onassis Senior Visiting Scholar and an NEH Public Scholar. His forthcoming tenth book is about the study of Egyptian mummies.
Prof. Vasant Shinde, Internationally renowned Archaeologist, was the Vice-Chancellor of the Deccan College, Post-Graduate and Research Institute, Deemed University, Pune. He obtained his B.A. in History from the University of Poona, and a Master’s Degree (First Class first) in Archaeology from Deccan College, Deemed University (at that time affiliated to the University of Poona). He subsequently completed his Ph.D. in Protohistoric Archaeology on Early Settlements in Central Tapi Basin from the same University. Prof. Shinde has been teaching the Post-Graduate course in Archaeology since 1982. In addition to being a senior faculty member and Research guide at Deccan College, Deemed University, University of Poona and Solapur University and Eotvos Lorand University of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary, he has been also conducting teaching for the Post-Graduate Diploma course at the Institute of Archaeology, Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi, since 1991.
Prof. Vasant S. Shinde has been a pioneer in archaeological research since the last 35 years, specializing in the Proto-history of South Asia as well as Field Archaeology. He has completed 16 major research projects, in the process of which he has collaborated with scholars and institutes from around the world, from Institutes such as the Universities of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the United States of America to Cambridge and Oxford Universities in the United Kingdom, to the International Research Center for Japanese Studies and Research Institute for Humanities and Nature (both in Kyoto, Japan), Seoul National University College of Medicine, South Korea, and so on. He has also directed a vast number of excavations around the country, from Harappan sites in Gujarat and Haryana to Chalcolithic sites in Madhya Pradesh and the Deccan, to Protohistoric and Early historic Sites in Rajasthan and Maharashtra. Presently, he has been directing a very prestigious research project at the largest Harappan site of Rakhigarhi in Haryana.
He has been awarded a number of honours and scholarships from various national and international bodies in the course of his Academic career. Professor Shinde has delivered no less than 140 special lectures in different parts of India, and 33 in Institutes abroad. He is a member of 17 National and International academic bodies.
Born in Athens, Professor Yangos Andreadis graduated from Athens University and obtained his PhD in 1980 from École de Hautes Études Paris on Dionysus and madness in Sophocles’s Antigone. He teaches Creative Writing and Theatre at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, where he also directs the M.A. program on Cultural Management. As a director of the Centre of Classical Drama of the same institution he has written, translated and directed more than ten ancient and modern plays. He has also served as president of the Artistic Committee of the National Theatre of Greece, he was elected representative of Greek Drama Centre at the UNESCO (1997-2001) and inaugurated the first Chair of Greek Culture and Language in Asia, in New Delhi (2000-2001).
Andreadis has written books on ancient tragedy, Dostoyevsky, Balzac and literary theory, as well as novels, short stories and poems. His most recent works are Smugglers: Stories Taken by Others(Topos Books 2008), The Whole World is a Stage: From Aeschylus to Brecht (Topos Books 2009) and On the History of Civilization (Topos Books 2010).
Dr. Calliope Rigopoulou is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Communication and Media Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her major research area is Aesthetics, Communication and Technology. She was a senior faculty member at the Laboratory of Arts and Cultural Management and she taught courses on Aesthetics and Communication, Image and Discourse Analysis, Myth, Art and Psychoanalysis, Representations of the Historical Trauma and Art and Technology.
She has served as the Director of Laboratory of Art and Cultural management, Director of Elelef periodical and was responsible for the Theatrical Group of the Department.
Her indicative publication are La scene chez Paul Klee, Aftomatopoiitiki, a discourse on Art and Technology, Narcissus, in the path of myth and image, The body as imploration and threat, The insane president and female pleasure, Questions of History of Culture (with Y. Andreadis)
Prof. Demetrios Th. Vassiliades (Dimitrios Vassiliadis) was born in the North Aegean island of Thassos (Greece) and got his first degree in Organization and Administration from the Economic University of Athens (ASOEE). After his graduation he traveled extensively in India and dedicated three decades to the study of the Indian languages, philosophies and culture.
He studied with the scholarships of the Greek Ministry of Education and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations at the Banaras Hindu University where he was awarded first class diplomas in Hindi and Sanskrit, a gold medal distinction for his M.A. in Indian Philosophy and Religion, and a Ph.D. degree in Philosophy and Religion for his dissertation, “A Critical and Comparative Study of the Presocratic Greek and Ancient Indian Philosophies.” He has been a Post Doctoral Fellow of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations and Research Associate in the Department of Hindi at the Banaras Hindu University.
Demetrios Vassiliades is a Founding Member and President of the Indo-Hellenic Society for Culture and Development in Athens and a Founding Member of the Indo-Hellenic Friendship League in New Delhi. He has participated in international seminars, delivered lectures in Indian and European Universities, authored books and contributed research papers and articles in Greece, India, Spain, Japan and South Korea. He is the editor of the Indika Online, an intercultural forum for the advancement of the Indo-Greek and indological studies in Greece. He teaches Hindi and Sanskrit at the School of Foreign Languages, University of Athens, and Indian Philosophy and Culture at the ELINEPA’s centers for Indian and Indo-Greek Studies in Athens and Thessaloniki. He was a Chairperson in the sections “Indian Philosophy” and “Philosophical Traditions in Asia & the Pacific” at the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy-Athens 2013. In 2014 he was nominated as a partner of the Portuguese Academy of Cultural and Artistic Heritage (Academia Lusófona do Património Cultural e Artístico).
Dr. Fernando Wulff Alonso is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Malaga, Spain since 2008; Professor of Ancient History at the same University since 1982; Scholar and professor at the University of Granada from 1978-82, where he completed his Doctoral Thesis directed by Dr. José Manuel Roldán Hervás. He has received various fellowships for stays, including at the Freie Universität in Berlin or the Banaras Hindu University in Benares, India.
He has directed various research projects, among others "Ethnic identities and political spaces in the Ancient History of the South Peninsular (VIII BC-II AD)", of the General Sub-Directorate of Research Projects of the Ministry of Education and Science. He is a Corresponding Academician of the Royal Academy of History (Madrid).
He works particularly in four areas: Roman Republic in Italy, Modern Historiography on the ancient world, Myth and gender (Greece and India in particular) and Romanization.
He is Director of the Group of Historiographic Studies (Andalusian Research Plan HUM. 0394) since 1984, which is financed by the Councils of Education and Science & Technology of the Junta de Andalucía with annual aid in a public call for evaluation of scientific activity since 1988 until 2008, and integrated into the Andalusian Center for Iberian Archeology (Resolution 7/7/2005 General Secretariat of Universities, Research and Technology of the Junta de Andalucía). He is also Director of the Project for the Conservation and Dissemination of Iberian Heritage in Malaga (Guadalteba, Malaga). "Member of the Excellence Project of the Junta de Andalucía directed by G. Cruz Andreotti, called " The construction and evolution of ethnic entities in Andalusia in Antiquity (VII BC-II AD) (HUM-3482).
Prof. Andreas L. Katonis has research interest in Philology (with specialization in Greek, Latin and Modern Greek Philology), Historical and Indo-European Linguistics (Comparative Philology), Ancient History and Mythology (Greek and Indo-European).
He finds especially fascinating comparisons between Greek and Indian literary works, and linguistic facts. He has delivered lectures comparing classical works and figures like Kannagi in the Tamil Silappatikaram and Sophocles’ Antigone. He has also written papers that have been published where the tragic fate of the heroine (the Palace Dancer Nati, Srimati) of Tagore’s drama Natir Puja is compared with that of Sophocles’ Antigone.
He has been associated with ELTE University (Budapest, Hungary), University of Athens (UOA, Athens, Greece) and Freie Universität (FU, Berlin, Germany). He served as faculty member at the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki (AUTH, Thessaloniki, Greece) as Professor of Speech Science and Historical Linguistics at the Italian Department and at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU, New Delhi, India) as a Visiting Professor at the Dimitrios Galanos Chair of Greek Studies.