doc. dr. Nina Petek

Head of research on Buddhist philosophical texts and meditation techniques

Nina Petek is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, where she teaches courses in Asian philosophical and religious traditions, with a special emphasis on the philosophical traditions and religions of India. Her research focuses on ontology and epistemology in the philosophical schools of India and Tibet, as well as the tradition of Buddhist eremitism. She translates from Sanskrit into Slovenian and is the author of two scholarly monographs: Bhagavadgita: onstran vezi, tostran svobode (Pivec Publishing House, 2021) and Na pragu prebujenja: svetovi sanj v budizmu (Beletrina Publishing House, 2022). She is the director of the Institute for the Study of Monasticism and Contemplative Science.

Project research areas: analysis of philosophical texts, study of meditation techniques, collection and editing of interviews during fieldwork in Ladakh, and preparation of material for the online documentary database

asist. dr. Sebastijan Pešec

Researcher, head of research on historical archives and the corpus of philosophical texts of the kagyu school

Sebastijan Pešec holds degrees in history and philosophy. He completed his doctoral studies at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, with a dissertation entitled Ethical Sensibility in Nietzsche and the Daoists. He is an assistant researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. In addition to Buddhist and Daoist philosophical traditions, his research also engages Nietzsche’s philosophy, contemporary ethics, philosophical anthropology, and the philosophy of religion.

Project research areas: analysis of philosophical texts, study of historical documents and Ladakhi chronicles, research on the development of Buddhism and the hermitic tradition in Ladakh, and preparation of material for the online documentary database

doc. dr. Damjan Popič

Researcher, head of documentary database management

Damjan Popič is an associate professor in the Department of Translation Studies at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana and a member of the Cognitive Modeling Laboratory at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science in Ljubljana. His research focuses primarily on digital humanities, corpus linguistics, and the creation of language resources that support different speech communities, especially endangered ones.

Project research areas: stewardship and management of the documentary database, and digitization of material heritage

red. prof. dr. Olga Markič

Researcher, head of research on hermits and society

Olga Markič is a full professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, where her teaching and research focus on logic and argumentation theory, philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of sport, and analytic philosophy.

Project research areas: analysis of Buddhist philosophical texts, analysis of mental states, conscious experiences, and various cognitive processes in the context of studying meditation techniques and meditative experience

doc. dr. Blaž Zabel

Researcher, head of research on the archives of the first European explorers of Ladakh

Blaž Zabel is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, where he teaches and assists in courses in aesthetics, ethics, philosophy of religion, philosophical anthropology, metaphysics, and ontology. His research focuses on intellectual history, with a particular emphasis on ethics and the history of globalization. He leads the research project Na poti k zgodovini primerjalne književnosti v luči globalizacije: Matija Murko in njegovi mednarodni sodelavci (J6-4620), funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARiS).

Project research areas: study of the archives of the first European explorers of Ladakh, archival research on the legacy of Sándor Csoma de Kőrös, and study of different aspects of the hermitic tradition in a globalized world

red. prof. dr. Borut Ošlaj

Researcher, head of research on hermits and nature

Borut Ošlaj is a full professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. He graduated from the Faculty of Arts in philosophy (A) and art history (B), and earned his doctorate at the Department of Philosophy there. He teaches, researches, and publishes in the fields of ethics, philosophical anthropology, and philosophy of religion. He is vice-chair of the Republic of Slovenia’s Commission for Medical Ethics and a founding member of the World Ethos Slovenia movement.

Project research areas: analysis of Buddhist philosophical texts, and the study of meditation techniques and meditative experience from the perspective of different states of consciousness and modes of cognition

doc. dr. Jan Ciglenečki

Researcher

Jan Ciglenečki is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, where he teaches courses in ancient and medieval philosophy as well as Asian philosophical and religious traditions. At the Institute for the Study of Monasticism and Contemplative Science, his primary research area is Eastern monastic traditions, especially Egyptian eremitism. Between 2018 and 2019, under the auspices of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), he led the project “Endangered Desert Settlements: Documenting Coptic Heritage in Middle Egypt and the Eastern Desert.”

Project research areas: study of the archives of the first European explorers of Ladakh

Bojan Brecelj

Photographer, video producer, artist

Bojan Brecelj, whose roots lie in the Mediterranean, is a renowned professional photographer, artist, and journalist who has been sailing the Mediterranean since childhood. He developed experience with the methodology of large-scale projects such as MED Land (launched in 2016) through his own projects as well as through collaboration with numerous journalistic and artistic groups. He began his project work with portraits of civilizations living along the world’s great rivers—the Ganges, the Nile, and the Sepik in Papua New Guinea—which were published in leading international and Slovenian magazines and books. In 2010 he began creating a series of portrait works across the Mediterranean, laying the foundations for the MED Land project. Over the past ten years he has also developed his original self-portrait studio, Selffishstudio, with which he achieved notable results, including series of social studies and portraits in places such as Sarajevo (2012–2014) and Palestine (2018).

Project role: photographer for documentary and artistic photography of the endangered material and intangible heritage of Ladakhi eremitism, and video producer

Ivana Petan

Artist, geomancer

Ivana Petan holds a master’s degree in the theory and philosophy of visual arts and has been self-employed in culture since 2007. She lives and works between Ljubljana and Nova vas in the Karst region. As a cultural practitioner, she works primarily in ceramics and geomancy, both in Slovenia and internationally. She participates in ceramic symposia and workshops, exhibits both collectively and individually, teaches ceramics, pottery, and geomancy, and creates within geomantic and lithopuncture projects as well as other collaborative projects that invite her to connect differences and open new horizons of the known and the possible.