Research on Orissa has been extensive and diverse and has produced many novel findings throughout history from earliest times until today. At the 17th annual European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies, which took place in Heidelberg, Germany, in 2002, a panel was devoted to regional studies of Orissa. The participants shared their academic perspectives and presented richly nuanced case studies of their socio-cultural research on Orissa. Topics discussed included language, religion, subaltern thought, gender, social change and art. This Special Issue of the Journal of Social Sciences, which contains revised versions of some of the papers presented at the conference, provides a glimpse of the broad spectrum of modern research on Orissa.
