Mery received her bachelor (in 1999) and master (in 2002) studies from Bogor Agriculture University (IPB), Indonesia and PhD study (in 2020) from Ghent University (Belgium). Her former experiences as junior researcher from research institutes and as a lecturer at Universitas Pelita Harapan (Indonesia) have brought her into contact with many ancient manuscripts and cultural perspectives. Her interest and research experiences with ancient Batak medicine based on Batak Pustaha (laklak) has provided much knowledge and inspiration related to the dynamic process occurred in Batak society that has developed over time. Recently, her involvement in the initiation program for digitizing ancient Batak manuscripts at Leiden University, the Netherlands in collaborations with the National Library of Indonesia, has made her interested in researching Batak church manuscripts, especially in the process of translating hymns (also known as Buku Ende HKBP) and other church hymns in Indonesia by comparing them with the original church lyrics and songs from the reference sources (for example German, Dutch, English or American hymns). Language was a critical tool in the missionary encounter, used both to translate biblical texts and hymns and to communicate Christian ideas. It emphasizes the challenges of translating religious concepts into local languages, which might lacked of finding the equivalent terms for Christian doctrines. The history of the HKBP church is also a fluid and dynamic process of transformation between missionaries and the local local populations (Batak people); how missionaries used language as a means of asserting authority and control, but also how Batak people could resist or reinterpret missionary teachings through their own linguistic practices.

Omri Ganchrow is a master's student in the Linguistics department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She holds a bachelor's degree in Linguistics and Archaeology, with an emphasis program in Digital Humanities. During her bachelor's, she has worked in the Computational Archaeological Lab as a scanner operator and analyzer. Her seminar paper in corpus linguistics resolved around translation of serial verb constructions from Indonesian to English in Chairil Anwar's poems. Omri has won two Khyentse Foundation awards (in Sanskrit and in Indonesian) and a Mandel scholarship. She has joined the Textual Microcosms project and is currently dealing with interlinear translations between Sanskrit and Balinese in Lontar manuscripts. As part of the project, she has been to Bali and studied Balinese as well as Lontar conservation at Udayana University, Denpasar.

Dr. Keiko Kamiishi received her Ph.D.(2022) and M.A.(2016) in International Area Studies from Nanzan University, Japan. She has been studying the history of Javanese literature, its connection with epics and myths, the dynamics between Indianized elements and indigenous elements, and the literary activities of court poets and scribes. Her interest also includes reception, aesthetic effect, performativity, prosody, and metaphors in the literature.

Her dissertation explored how the Javanese unique aesthetic sense manifests in the literature by interpreting the metaphors and emotional expression in a specific literary work titled Kakawin Ghaṭotkacāśraya.

After completing the dissertation, she worked as a part-time Lecturer in Indonesian grammar.

Currently, she joined the ERC project as a post-doctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is dealing with Old Javanese poetries translated into Modern Javanese in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, with the perspective of examining modern Muslim translators’ interpretation of ancient literature based on Hindu-Javanese culture.

Danielle Chen Kleinman is a Ph.D. candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Prof. Yigal Bronner and Prof. Ronit Ricci. Danielle’s research project explores the kakawin genre – a form of court poetry written in Old Javanese – and focuses on its metapoetic and reflexive dimensions. Danielle is also interested in the literary and cultural dialogue the kakawin genre shared with Sanskrit court poetry and studies the multiple ways in which Sanskrit literary models were incorporated into kakawin aesthetics through a process of redefinition and intermixture with local-Javanese aesthetics. Danielle is a member of the ERC research project The New Ecology of Expressive Modes in Early-Modern South India (NEEM; P.I: Prof. David Shulman) and a fellow of the Azrieli Fellows Program. In the Textual Microcosms project, Danielle will work on interlinear translations of Sanskrit texts into Old Javanese.

A faculty member at the Department of Qurʾānic Studies of Universitas Islam Negeri Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta, Indonesia and the director of Laboratorium Studi Qur’an-Hadis (LSQH). After completing his bachelor and master studies in Qur’anic Studies in UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta, he received his Ph.D at the Department of Islamic Studies, Orientalisches Seminar, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg in 2019. His work mainly deals with Qur’anic studies, Qurʾānic hermeneutics and the history of tafsīr in Indonesia, with his most recent publication includes “Vernacularism and the Embers of Conservatism: The Production and Politicization of Qur’an Translations” (2003) and The Official Indonesian Qur’an Translation: The History and Politics of Al-Qur’an dan Terjemahnya, The Global Qur’an Series (Cambridge, OpenBook Publisher, 2022).

Dluha received his BA in Tafsir and his MA in Gender from UIN Sunan Kalijaga in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. From his bachelor's degree until the present, he has been an associate researcher at LSQH (Laboratorium Studi al-Qur'an dan Hadis/Laboratory for Quran and Hadith Studies). Dluha is also a researcher in Rumah KitaB, an Indonesia-based NGO focusing on gender activism in Islamic societies and (traditional) institutions, and a member of Gender Pokja of the Netherlands-Indonesia Consortium for Muslim-Christian Relations (NICMCR). His studies mostly focus on queer issues and/in the Islamic texts, which in turn lead him to his most recent interest in Quran translation. Dluha joins the Textual Microcosms Project as a PhD student. He works on interlinear translations into Javanese of printed Islamic literature produced in Indonesia around the 1970-1980s, many of which are still in circulation in many Pesantrens today.

Willem van der Molen studied Javanese literature at Leiden University (PhD 1983). After thirty years of teaching at the same university he spent another ten years, until his retirement, as a researcher at the Royal Institute of Southeast Asian and Carribean Studies (KITLV), also in Leiden. He is professor of Philology and Old Javanese at Universitas Indonesia, and was visiting researcher and visiting professor at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Osaka University and the Israel Institute of Advanced Studies. His publications include a re-edition of Kern’s edition of the Old Javanese Ramayana.

Willem van der Molen in Jerusalem

From 13 April to 5 May 2023, at the invitation of Ronit I was part of the research group, doing research, participating in the discussions, weekly lunch meetings and daily chats, and making new friends. It was an excellent opportunity to hear about everybody’s work, the more so as Ronit’s perfect timing of my visit allowed me to participate in the yearly workshop of the project. For my research during these three weeks I concentrated on the genre of Javanese texts known as jarwa ‘interpretation’, written in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In three talks I explored – summarily – the views of some famous predecessors on this genre, how the idea of jarwa had worked out in the case of the Old Javanese Ramayana (according to the Central Javanese tradition), and, finally, how the Merapi-Merbabu branch of the Ramayana tradition adds to the picture. The lively discussions after the talks, while laying bare how little has been done in this particular field, were very helpful to take me further.

The Old Javanese enthusiasts, inside and outside the project, set time apart for a short series of reading sessions. Once a week we bent over the Smaradahana, a challenging text that left us with many a question mark as to the correct interpretation (in this we found ourselves in the company of its learned editor, Poerbatjaraka). I have to admit that I did not spend much thought on jarwa literature before I took the bus to Jerusalem. Following others who thought so already I now realize that there are some quite interesting and enjoyable texts tucked away in this corner of Javanese literature. It is my plan to continue paying attention to those texts, in the first place the various manifestations of the Ramayana.

 

Taufiq Hanafi is interested in cultural politics, especially in regards to the production, regulation, supervision and distribution of (literary) texts. He has recently completed his PhD thesis Leiden University that looks into knowledge production in Indonesia under the New Order authoritarian regime and the state censorship that surrounds it. In the Netherlands, he is involved within the decolonization research project organized by KITLV, NIOD, and NIMH and from 2021 to 2022 has translated into Indonesian at least three books that resulted from the project, namely: Sporen vol betekenis: ‘Getuigen &Tijdgenoten’ over the Indonesische Onafhankelijkheidsoorlog, Over de Grens: Nederlands Extreem Geweld in de Indonesische Onafhankelijkheidsoorlog, 1945-1949, and Beelden van de Indonesische onafhankelijkheidsoorlog, 1945-1949. For the ERC project Textual Microcosm at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, Taufiq investigates the nuance and complexity in the interlinear translation of the Holy Quran into Sundanese.

Genie (Jin Hee) Yoo is a postdoctoral researcher for the ERC project, "Textual Microcosms: A New Approach in Translation Studies," in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Genie works at the intersection of history of science, medicine, religious studies, and the history of the book, and has an abiding interest in European and indigenous cross-cultural knowledge production in island Southeast Asia (17^th - 20^th c.). As a postdoctoral researcher, she plans to examine interlinear translations in Malay- and Arabic-language manuscripts from Indonesia and to explore vernacular epistemologies of science and medicine, in relation to local Islamic practices, through a close study of this translation process. She is also interested in the role of language and translation in the history of inter-religious dynamics in the eastern archipelago under Dutch colonialism. 

Genie received her PhD and MA in History at Princeton University, MA in Southeast Asian Studies at Cornell University, and BA in Ethnomusicology at the University of California in Riverside. She is excited to work collaboratively with colleagues and scholars during her time at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem!  

Dr. Maftuhin is an associate professor of Islamic Law at the State Islamic University of Sunan Kalijaga, Indonesia. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Asian Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He joined the ERC-funded project, "Textual Microcosms: A New Approach in Translation Studies." In particular, he is researching the translation of Qur'anic verses about Muslim women's clothing in various interlinear translation manuscripts in the Indonesian archipelago from the 19th to the 20th centuries.

He is an interdisciplinary academic, working on various issues in Islamic law, political Islam, and disability studies. His work includes the translation of English and Arabic books into Indonesian, various works on Islamic and disability studies, and popular articles for Indonesian national newspapers and magazines. 

Since 2010 he has been helping people with disabilities to get access to educational rights, particularly higher education. He was Head of the Center for Services for Persons with Disabilities (2013-2020) and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of INKLUSI: Journal of Disability Studies.

For more detailed information about his works, check his blog at https://maftuh.in

Aglaia Iankovskaia did her undergraduate studies in Ethnology and Anthropology at St. Petersburg State University and received a Master’s degree in Medieval Studies from the Central European University, Budapest. During her Ph.D. studies in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), St. Petersburg, she also completed non-degree programs in Morocco and Indonesia.

In 2016, Aglaia defended a doctoral thesis dealing with the medieval Arabic sources on the Indonesian-Malay world and the conceptions and perceptions of the region they represent. Since 2017, she has been working in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography as a junior research fellow. Aglaia’s research interests include cultural connections between the Middle East and maritime Southeast Asia, Indian Ocean history, and the history and cultural anthropology of Sumatra. Within the framework of the project, she plans to look into interlinear translations from Arabic to Malay in the context of the spread and reception of the Middle Eastern Islamicate culture in the Malay-Indonesian region after 1500.