Steven M. Vose holds the Bhagwan Suparshvanatha Endowed Professorship in Jain Studies at CU Denver. He is a historian of the religious traditions of South Asia, focusing on Jain communities in western India from the late medieval period to the present. Within and between these traditions, he focuses on contemporary and historical processes of community formation by examining discourses and practices of authority, sectarian polemics, mendicant-lay interactions, and connections between and among gender, caste, class, sect, and polity. He examines public expressions of devotion, such as pilgrimage and temple-building, and ritual, as well as the place of tantra and alchemy in South Asian social life. His work also engages material culture – inscriptions, images, iconography, architecture, manuscripts, etc. Additionally, he works on the development of vernacular literary traditions and the interactions of Sanskrit, Prakrit, and regional languages (such as Gujarati) with Persianate and Islamicate literary and courtly practices. His theory interests center on cultural and social history in the study of religion, literary theory and religious reading practices, practical ethics and “lived religions” approaches, modern and pre-modern religious identity politics, transnational religious publics, and religious- and ethno-nationalist conflict and non-/violence.
