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.