This Summer Academy offers a research-based rigorous philological training program for exploring Sanskrit manuscripts and epigraphical material preserved in Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley. By combining text readings with field visits, the program provides the framework to connect premodern cultural and religious knowledge from text sources with sacred sites and extant in situ artefacts. In particular, the focus will be on selected texts that speak to the rituals and iconographical schemes relating to Buddhist, Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava and Śākta deities (and their respective multiple identities) and on associated sacred sites and communities. The modules are thus designed to explore topics of Himalayan religious cultures, such as the characteristic interplay between interreligious connectivities and exclusive means of religious identification, processes that are shaped by the Kathmandu Valley’s position as a major conduit of communication between the Subcontinent and the Tibetan Plateau. The Summer Academy thereby offers participants the opportunity to advance language skills and to explore the past in the present through the material remains and the cultural legacy in present local Newar Buddhist and Hindu, as well as Tibetan communities.

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