Jacob Schmidt-Madsen

Jacob Schmidt-Madsen studies the cultural history of games and play from the earliest times to the present. He specializes in the field of traditional South Asian games and wrote his PhD on the Indian origins of the modern children's game "Snakes & Ladders." His work explores how formal game systems are invested with meaning and used for purposes of ritual, divination, education, and other playful yet serious practices. He employs a wide range of textual, visual, material, and ethnographic sources collected from private and public archives and during fieldwork.

Jacob takes active part in the international board game studies community and is a frequent contributor to the annual Board Game Studies Colloquium and Ludofest. He has published in Indological and game studies journals, and an updated and revised version of his PhD thesis will soon be out with Primus Books in Delhi. He is currently working on the translation of three encyclopedic game texts from nineteenth-century India and a monograph introducing scholars and general readers to the field of traditional South Asian games. 

Jacob is an Affiliated External Researcher in the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. He serves as the Management Committee member for Denmark in the GameTable COST Action, which brings together two hundred game researchers from 50 different countries. He sits on the editorial board of the Board Game Studies journal and is a reviewer for the Game Studies journal. He also forms part of the design collective "Hopeless Games" exploring the interface between art, games, and storytelling.

Jacob is associated with the research group Astral Sciences in Trans-Regional Asia (ASTRA) headed by Anuj Misra. His main focus is on games as cosmological models and their transmission in trans-regional Asia.