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Mantras in Religion, Media, and Society in Global Southern Asia (MANTRAMS)

Everyday, tens of millions of people use mantras—sacred utterances, formulas, and powerful syllables—in ritual, meditation, yoga, and healing. Articulated in Sanskrit and other Indic languages, mantras originated in the religious traditions of early India and then spread via practitioners, texts, rituals, and iconography throughout Asia and around the world. While speech and sound are central to mantra practices, mantras take a range of material forms: they may be chanted aloud, contemplated in silence, inscribed on surfaces, written in manuscripts, printed on posters, visually encoded in diagrams, or worn as amulets and textiles; mantras also circulate widely online and in digital media.

Funded by a Synergy Grant from the European Research Council, MANTRAMS is a pioneering, large-scale research project entirely dedicated to mantras, past and present. Launched in September 2024, MANTRAMS brings the first-ever Synergy Grant to the Humanities Division at Oxford, as well as one of the largest single awards (9.65 million euros) granted to humanities research globally. The six-year project will be jointly hosted by the University of Oxford, the University of Vienna, and the University of Tübingen. This funding will support postdoctoral positions, doctoral students, conferences, and an array of high-impact deliverables and publications. Radically interdisciplinary and comparative, the project will produce a history and anthropology of mantras, including extensive sonic, textual, and visual archives. This ambitious undertaking will investigate mantras across millennia and around the world, examining the roots of mantra in the religions of the Indian subcontinent, their circulation across South and Southeast Asia, and their transcultural significance in global spiritualities today.

grant no. 101118934