Signe Cohen (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is Associate Professor of South Asian Religions in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her main research interests are Hinduism and South Asian Buddhism. Trained as a Sanskritist, she works on Hindu and Buddhist texts, both in Sanskrit and in other ancient Asian languages such as Pali, Tibetan, and Tocharian. Her book Text and Authority in the Older Upanishads was published by Brill in 2008. Her current book project involves ancient Hindu and Buddhist robot tales. In her work, she explores how these ancient texts about mechanically constructed beings express fundamental religious ideas about the soul and soullessness.