Dr Maddalena Italia

Maddalena Italia is Teaching Fellow in Sanskrit at SOAS, where she teaches the modules Sanskrit 1A, 1B, and Directed Readings; she also teaches Sanskrit in the SOAS Language Centre at Elementary and Intermediate levels.

She previously held a three-year Leverhulme-funded Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at University College London, where she conducted research on the modern reception and translation of Sanskrit literature within a comparative framework. She remains an Associate Lecturer at UCL, where she has also taught Classical Greek and Latin. Her research focuses on the ways in which Sanskrit texts have been read, translated, and reinterpreted in modern European contexts, with particular attention to classical poetry and drama.

Maddalena’s work brings together Sanskrit philology, reception studies, and translation theory, and is informed by sustained comparative engagement with Greek and Roman classical traditions. Her Leverhulme project examined how different literary cultures have constructed and transmitted the idea of the ‘classical’, and how comparative study reshapes our understanding of classicality, canon formation, and cultural authority across time and space. She is completing a monograph on the modern reception of Sanskrit erotic poetry, which explores questions of mediation, (un)translatability, and the cultural frameworks shaping encounters with Sanskrit verse.

• Sanskrit language and literature
• Modern reception and translation of Sanskrit texts
• Comparative classics and reception studies
• Translation theory and (un)translatability