Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz is Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Asian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. She has researched Hindu practices, literature, and women in Nepal since the late 1990s. Her earlier work, Reciting the Goddess: Narratives of Place and the Making of Hinduism in Nepal (OUP 2018), presents an archival and ethnographic study of Nepal's local goddess Svasthani, the widely read Svasthani Vrata Katha, and the role both goddess and text have played in the construction of Nepali Hindu identity and practice. Reciting the Goddess earned the American Academy of Religion's 2019 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion.

Alaka Atreya Chudal is Senior Lecturer in Department of South Asian, Tibetan, and Buddhist Studies at the University of Vienna. Her research integrates anthropology, literary studies, history, religious studies, cultural studies, print culture, and intellectual history, with a focus on Nepal and India from the late nineteenth century to the present.