By pursuing an MSt in Study of Religions at Oxford, I intend to place Catholic and Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava theologies into dialogue, investigating the relationship between divine bliss, creation, and ritual enactment.
Engaging with Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, St Thomas Aquinas, and Hans Urs von Balthasar alongside the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Rūpa Gosvāmī, my project explores two main points of connection between these distinct theological frameworks. First, I wish to examine the concept of a hedonic cause for creation, where finite beings are brought forth by God from His primordial oneness to make divine reality dynamic via the relational exchanges made possible by multiplicity. Second, I aim to analyse similar notions of rituals as re-enactments of divine reality present in both theologies, whether through the Catholic Eucharist and iconography, or mūrti-sevā and līlā enactments in the Hindu temple.
My comparative interest is rooted in my multicultural upbringing in Rome, Italy. My North American mother and Italian father are both Western Gaudīya Vaisnava practitioners. I grew up surrounded by an interfaith community that gathered around their Indological library and cultural centre in the city’s historic heart. Alongside exploring Rome’s endless Catholic churches and making pilgrimages to Vaisnava sacred sites in India, I pursued these interests academically in my Bachelor’s degree in Literature at the University of Bologna, where I studied revelation, sacred representation, divine presence and acquired a literary sensitivity for sacred narratives.
I hope to develop this work toward a life in interfaith scholarship and dialogue, bringing together the theological, literary, and lived dimensions of religious traditions. I also hope to do so through a public engagement of such dimensions within cultural events and exhibitions, as the ones I have been curating in the past years in Rome and Bologna. I am immensely grateful to the Ertegun Programme for giving me the opportunity to pursue my scholarly passions, and I hope to repay this debt through a meaningful contribution to the humanities, which its founders so deeply loved.
