I am a graduate of the Liberal Arts and Eastern Classics programs at St. John’s College, a student of Sanskrit, and a teacher of Latin and Ancient Greek. My research focuses on aesthetics, poetics and hermeneutics in philosophical traditions in India and the Ancient Mediterranean.
My experience studying philosophy cross-culturally has led me to agree with Jonardon Ganeri’s assessment: “The urgent need of philosophy now is to decolonize, and that means to globalize, to embrace and incorporate a diverse plurality of philosophical traditions and practices” (“Why Philosophy Needs Sanskrit: Now More than Ever”).
The Greco-Indian comparative field has had a longstanding relationship with colonial hegemony. My own comparative research is therefore informed by a diversity of critical methodologies: the revaluation of classics by ‘critical ancient world studies’, the emphasis on practice in ‘philosophy as a way of life’ and the counter-hegemonic potentials of polycentricity (Edward Butler’s “Polycentric Polytheism and Philosophy of Religion”; “Bhakti and Henadology”).
I intend to pursue as a doctoral research project a comparative study of the role of the erotic (erōs and śṛṅgārarasa) in the aesthetics of Plotinus and Abhinavagupta.