Peer Review Process

All submissions are first assessed by the members of the editorial board to assess their suitability for our journal. All selected submissions then undergo a double-blind peer review to assure the quality of our publications. We aim to receive two reviews for each selected submission. The criteria of the review include:

• scholarship
• method and argumentation
• language and style

We ask our reviewers to furnish us with their review within four weeks.

Open Access Policy

This journal offers free access (Open Access) to its content, in line with the basic assumption that the free public availability of research benefits a worldwide exchange of knowledge. Users can read, download, copy, print, distribute, link and use the articles published here for any legally compliant purpose without having to obtain the prior consent of the publisher or the author.

All contributions are published under the Creative Commons licence CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Publication frequency

The Interdisziplinäre Zeitschrift für Südasienforschung (IZSAF) is published once a year. Special issues will also be published.

Editorial Board

Christopher D. Bahl is Assistant Professor in South Asian History at Durham University. From 2018-2020 he was a Research Associate at the Orient-Institute Beirut. His new postdoctoral research focuses on transregional knowledge formation and forms of early modern community building across the Indian Ocean region. He is especially interested in the transregional entanglements of South Asia and the Middle East with other regions. He completed his PhD in History at SOAS, University of London, in 2018. His doctoral dissertation is entitled Histories of Circulation – Sharing Arabic Manuscripts across the Western Indian Ocean, 1400-1700. He received his Magister Artium in Islamic Studies and South Asian History from the University of Heidelberg in 2013 and a MA in Historical Research Methods from SOAS in 2014. He spent a year studying at the Damascus University, Syria, and the Central University, Hyderabad, India.

Tobias Berger is assistant professor for Political Science with reference to the Transnational Politics of the Global South at the Otto-Suhr-Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin. His research interests include the transnational politics of South Asia, International Political Sociology, and the interaction between transnational norms and non-state institutions in general. After receiving his doctorate in Political Science for a thesis on transnational influences on non-state justice institutions in rural Bangladesh, he was a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Anthropology in Halle/Saale and at the Institute for the Human Sciences in Vienna.

Carmen Brandt is junior professor for Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Bonn. She received her doctorate with a thesis on the portrayal of itinerant communities in Bengal, so-called ‘Bedes’, in fictional and non-fictional literature. Her recent research explores the sociocultural and sociopolitical dimensions of script in modern South Asia. Her other research areas are Bengali culture(s) and language, and minority and language politics in South Asia.

Simon Cubelic is research associate at the Research Unit "Documents on Religion and Law of Pre-modern Nepal" of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities as well as member of the Project "Transcultural Legal Flows in 18th and 19th Century South Asia: Changing Ideas and Practices of Law and Legitimation in Hindu Legal Cultures" of the Cluster of Excellence Asia and Europe in a Global Context at Heidelberg University. His research interests include Dharmaśāstra -literature, intellectual history of legal and political thought of pre-modern South Asia and cultural history of nineteenth-century Nepal.  

Maria Framke is a historian of modern South Asia, specifically focusing on the themes of history of politics, humanitarianism, international relations and ideologies. Her research interests include topics such as fascism, colonialism and imperialism, ideas and knowledge transfer, and transnational history. Maria is affiliated with the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin. Currently, she is working on a project on ‘South Asian humanitarianism in armed conflicts, 1899-1949’. Maria received her doctorate from Jacobs University Bremen in 2011. Her book on the ‘Engagement with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism in India, 1922-1939’ was published in 2013 by the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt.

Arne Harms is a lecturer at University of Leipzig’s Anthropology department and postdoctoral researcher at DFG funded collaborative research centre ‘Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition’ (SFB 1199). Currently, he is investigating financialization of nature, with a particular focus on carbon forestry in South Asia. He obtained my doctorate in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Berlin’s Free University with a thesis on everyday disasters and environmental displacement in the Indian Sundarbans. He has held teaching positions and fellowships in Berlin, Cologne, Munich and at India’s Nalanda University.

Natalie Lang is a postdoctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Her research interests include religion, migration, diaspora, and urbanity. She defended her doctoral thesis in Anthropology on Hindu religion in the French overseas department La Réunion at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen. Natalie Lang was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt. She holds an M.A. in Migration and Diaspora Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and a B.A. in South Asian Studies from the University of Heidelberg.

Anna-Lena Wolf is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. Before, Anna-Lena Wolf worked as a doctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology in Bern. She finished her PhD on the moral economy of Assam’s tea production in October 2018. At the University of Heidelberg, Anna-Lena Wolf studied social anthropology and South Asian history.