About

Maddalena started working on her doctoral thesis in September 2013, after completing her MA (with Distinction) in Languages and Cultures of South Asia at SOAS. Before moving to SOAS, she earned her BA and MA in Classics (both cum laude) from Milan State University. Her first MA dissertation focused on the Sanskrit figure of speech śleṣa (“Śleṣa, or ‘double meaning’: traces of stylistic continuity from the Ṛgveda to Sanskrit kāvya literature”). Her SOAS Master’s dissertation (“Non-verbal communication in Sanskrit kāvya literature: an emic perspective”) dealt with the theoretical frameworks through which literary body language is analyzed in Sanskrit systematic thought on drama and literature (nāṭya- and sāhityaśāstra).

Maddalena’s doctoral research aims to offer new insights and a better understanding of the history of the modern reception of Sanskrit erotic poetry. In her PhD thesis (working title: “The erotic untranslatable: the modern reception of Sanskrit love poetry in the West and in India”), Maddalena analyses commentaries, translations, and rewritings of Sanskrit erotic poetry produced by modern intellectuals – Orientalists, Indian nationalists, colonial and post-colonial translators, poets, and philologists.