The Research Team
Erika Caranti
is a post-doctoral Fellow at the Department of Humanities at the University of Turin.
She earned her PhD in 2022, at the University of Tübingen, with a dissertation titled Interlocking dimensions in Hindustani music: texts of caitī, kajrī, and jhūlā (awarded the Doctoral Prize of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Tübingen).
Her field of interest covers sound cultures of the Indian subcontinent, Hindustani music, orality and aural texts, bhakti, performative, and ‘living traditions’ in India.
She is part of the interdisciplinary project titled Sacred Sound–Musical Manifestations of the Sacred between theory and practice at the University of Tübingen.
She began her approach to Jainism driven by the interest in exploring how certain Jain singing forms embody and reformulate relevant theology and religious practices. She attended a Winter and a Summer School on Jainism (a five-week advanced program in Pune) organized by the International School for Jain Studies (ISJS).
Alessandra Consolaro
is a Full Professor of Hindi Language and Literature at the University of Turin.
Her interdisciplinary research is based on feminist and gender criticism. She has worked on the history of South Asia, the history of the Hindi language, and the critical study and translation of contemporary Hindi literature.
She is interested in investigating Jain influences on contemporary Hindi literary production.
She has translated into Italian the poems by Jacinta Kerketta (Brace, Miraggi 2018) and Kunwar Narain (Kumarjiv, Fuorilinea 2023) and the novel Ret Samādhi by Geetanjali Shree (Ret Samādhi. Oltre la frontiera, Solferino 2024)
Veronica Ghirardi
is a Research Fellow at the Department of Humanities of the University of Turin.
She received her doctoral degree in 2018 at the University of Turin, based on her research into contemporary Hindi novels and their possible postmodern manifestations.
Her research interests lie in contemporary Hindi fiction, Dalit writing, life writing, and gender studies. She is the author of Postmodern Traces and Recent Hindi Novels (Vernon Press 2021) and of the Italian translation (together with Prof. Alessandra Consolaro) of Ret Samādhi, a Hindi novel by Geetanjali Shree (Solferino 2024).
She began her approach to Jainism thanks to a Winter School on Jainism organized by the International School for Jain Studies (ISJS). She is particularly interested in the spiritual value of food, Jain veganism, and the ethic of nonviolence (ahiṃsā).
Gianni Pellegrini
is an Associate Professor of Indian Philosophies and Religions and of Sanskrit Language and Literature at the Department of Humanities of the University of Turin. He serves on the Executive Board of both the International Association of Sanskrit Studies (IASS) and the Associazione Italiana di Studi Sanscriti (AISS).
His research interests focus on classical Indian philosophical thought, from the early centuries BCE to the present, with particular attention to the logical, epistemological, and metaphysical traditions of Advaita Vedānta (and other non-dualistic systems) and Nyāya. A special emphasis is placed on the premodern period of Indian philosophy, marked by the meta-linguistic methodology of Navya Nyāya.
Another major field of his research concerns the reconstruction of the textual, philosophical, and cultural background that led to the codification of the Yogasūtra, as well as the development of its subsequent hermeneutical tradition.
His recent publications include Yogasūtra (ed. by Federico Squarcini, Einaudi, Turin 2019) and Behind Kṛṣṇa’s Hint of Smile (with A. Rigopoulos, SUNY, Albany 2024). He is also co-editor (with F. Squarcini) of the series Apavarga (ETS, Pisa), devoted to editions and translations of South Asian doxographical works of philosophical import.
Sara Roncaglia
is a cultural anthropologist. She taught Cultural Anthropology at the State University of Milan and is currently a post-doctoral Fellow at the Department of Humanities at the University of Turin.
For her PhD, she conducted ethnographic research on the cultural implications of the particular system of food distribution in Mumbai established by what are known as dabbawalas. Her research over the last decade has led her to pay close attention to how societies deal with issues of food, particularly when they intersect with other dimensions of social stratification. In 2019-2020 she attended the Winter School on Jainism in Ahmedabad organized by the International School for Jain Studies (ISJS), where she deepened her study of the spiritual and cultural value of food in Jainism.
She is the author of Feeding the City: Work and Food Culture of the Mumbai Dabbawala (Open Book Publishers, 2013); Canti urbani. Trasformazioni del lavoro e degli spazi di vita a Mumbai (Raffaello Cortina, 2019); “Social Anthropology in India: Studying the Self in the Other” in Histories of Anthropology, D’Agostino G., Matera V., eds. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).