Moumita Sen is an Associate Professor of Culture Studies and project lead for ERC Starting grant 2023-28 Political Deification: Theorising from Asia and for RCN researcher project 2020-24 ‘Mythopolitics in South Asia´. Her forthcoming monograph Mythopolitics in India: Caste, Religion, and Politics is based on her postdoctoral research which focuses on the intersection of aesthetic discourse, popular religiosity, and organized politics in caste activism India. Her larger research interest is in the field of Indian visual culture. Her doctoral dissertation (2016), received the Norwegian king’s gold medal for outstanding research in 2017. She is the co-editor of Nine Nights of the Goddess: The Navaratri Festival in South Asia (SUNY, 2018). Sen is a founder member of the popular research platform and collective ‘Theory from the Margins’.

Saimum Parvez is a Senior Researcher at the MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society. Prior to his role at MF, Saimum was a lecturer at DW Academy in Bonn, Germany.  He was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA-COFUND) postdoctoral fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB), Belgium. Before joining the VUB, he was a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Political Science and Sociology, North South University, Bangladesh. Parvez received his Ph.D. (2021) from the University of Sydney. He achieved his MA (2015) from the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University under the Fulbright scholarship program. His recent publications were published in Democratization (2021), Perspectives on Terrorism (2019), Terrorism and Political Violence (2018), and Political Violence in South Asia (2018). He received the Center for Genocide Studies and United Nations Development Programme (CGS-UNDP) Peace Fellowship 2018. Parvez’s research interests include Politics and Religion, South Asian migrants in Europe, and Contemporary Bangladesh Politics. 

Florence Durney is an anthropologist whose broad-scale research interests center on the relationships of human societies and their environments. The majority of her research has focused on the intersections of cosmology, governance, and change.  Dr Durney currently works as a research fellow with the ERC funded project POLDEI at MF Vitenskapelig Høyskole,  and with the University of Oslo’s Energy initiative project RESULTS at the Centre for Development and Environment.  

Before joining UiO, Durney completed her education at Columbia University and the University of Arizona, where she also lectured in anthropology. She has also worked as a contracted researcher on projects across the social and natural sciences including at the University of Arizona, the American Museum of Natural History, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and beyond.

Munkhnaran Bayarlkhagva is a Doctoral Research Fellow at the MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society on the POLDEI project. His academic background is in International Relations and he is particularly interested in the interplay between Historical International Relations, memory and ontological security in Asia. More broadly, Munkhnaran’s research is about the role of religion, in the form Vajrayana Buddhism, in modern political communities.

Anni Karin Rambek is an advisor and works as the administrative officer for the ERC Starting Grant 2023-28 on Political Deification: Theorising from Asia. She is also an advisor in student and research administration at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society. She holds an integrated master's degree in Foreign Language Teacher Education (French) from the University of Bergen.