The theme of the 2026 CSRI conference is Decoration and Adornment in the religious traditions of India and its diasporas. This conference engages with a range of disciplinary and methodological approaches to the rich and varied decorative and elaborative practices—visual, verbal, lyrical, and other—practiced, theorized, and articulated by diverse religious traditions and communities of India and its diasporas.
The papers in this conference include the visual ornamentation of deities, worship spaces, and/or religious bodies; poetic adornment and rhetorical adornment; sartorial creativity and excess; modes of aesthetic perception; ritual accoutrement and accessory; the adornment of built environments; the afterlives of ephemeral decorative objects.
You can navigate to the conference abstracts via this link.