I come to the great state of New Jersey off the heels of a BA in Classics at Barnard College (2021, cum laude) where I studied Greek and Sanskrit literature. My senior thesis, “A Tiger Comes to Mind: Meditations & Mediations at Border of Megasthenes’ Indica”, took its name and, in part, its frame, from a poem of Jorge Luis Borges wherein a hunter considers the various forms —real, fictive, and symbolic— the tiger he hunts after embodies. As such, my thesis examined the multiform existence of the border between the Seleucid East and the Mauryan West as articulated by the Greek historian, Megasthenes, while he was deployed at the court of Chandragupta Maurya.
 
These days, my research takes up two asymptotic movements of what I term “philological consciousness”, first, in the 3rd and 2nd c. BC with Ptolemaic and Seleucid literatures, especially those produced on their Eastern frontiers, and second, in the 18th and 19th c. AD with British literatures, especially those produced in India. In distilling the methods employed by ancient grammarians and ethnographers to make the Greek language a recognizable, categorizable, and historicizable unit, my research takes up the solution antiquity’s linguistic models might provide to the problem of “the Urheimat”. With this double-visioned reading, I offer the possibility of Hellenistic philology’s reparative renegotiation of Proto-Indo-European, enabling a dialogic and syncretic treatment of both epistemologies and their articulations of the universal. Necessarily, I search for answers not only in the scar-tissues of Hellenism, but also in traditions of South Asian intellectualism (especially those animated by Kosambi, Mohan Roy, and Tagore) and traditions of weltliteratur (especially those animated by Auerbach, Steiner, and Said).
 
Elsewhere on campus, I serve as the graduate coordinator for Princeton’s Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, a program I myself was part of at Barnard, which constellates my interests in undergraduate mentorship, pedagogy, and Critical University Studies. 

My intellectual commitments are inseparable from, if not geminate to, my political commitments, especially those mobilized towards decolonization, demilitarization, and abolition. At Princeton I organize with the movement for graduate student unionization through Princeton Graduate Student United and with the movement for institutional divestment from genocide through Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest. At home, in Philly, I spend time with the Renters’ Justice Collective and other groups fighting displacement and dispossession in our incredible city.

I’m more than happy to talk to prospective graduate students about the pre-doctoral fellowship or any other aspect of the above biography.