Ben Williams, PhD candidate, writes, “Through the auspices of the IIE Fulbright grant, I intend to conduct my doctoral research in Pondicherry, India on the intersection of literary theory and theology in the corpus of Abhinavagupta, an eleventh-century polymath and Shaiva religious virtuoso. Clarifying the interpretive strategies of Abhinavagupta’s texts in these two disciplines will help us better assess the scope of his innovations to Shaiva literature and the courtly tradition of poetics, two largely independent fields of scholasticism that began to overlap in creative and novel ways within his systematic thought.”
Harper Sutherland, AB ’14 received a Fulbright-Nehru Research Grant and plans to spend the coming year in India.