Curriculum vitae

Education

MA, Theology, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sociology of Religion, dissertation titled: The Troubadours of Bengal, King’s College, London University.

PhD, History, thesis titled: Sephardi Jewish converts in Early Modern Amsterdam: The Quest for Zion in the Dutch Republic, University of Westminster, London. The strand of my doctoral work with particular relevance to the Munich fellowship programme concerns the double logic of identity in relation to the Portuguese nação or ‘nation’, which is an imagined community that comprised all the descendants of the Sephardi Jews of 1492. It included the New Christians on the Iberian Peninsula, in the colonies, the refugees of the First Sephardi Diaspora of 1492 in the Middle East and North Africa, and the migrants of the Second Sephardi Diaspora of around 1590. The ‘nação’ was an ethnic concept that linked Christians, Jews and also Muslims together on the basis of a shared history. Their stories shed light on how the early modern migratory course would shape modern Jewish identities in centuries to come.

April – September: Fellow at Munich Research Centre for Exploring Jewish Cultural Heritage in the Near East, Ludwig Maximilian University, (LMU), Munich, Germany. Fellowship programme: From Pre-Modern to Modern Perspectives in Judaic Studies, with the paper titled: From Babylon to Kolkata: Jews of the Near East United by Exile.
October 2025 – January, 2026: Fellow at Herbert D. Katz Centre for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. Research proposal: Rabbi Morteira's unruly students: A 17th century Sephardi rabbi's war against secular thought. This will examine Saul Levi Morteira’s manuscript sermons and their role in Jewish memory creation in the birth of the Western Sephardim, and expand the rabbi’s homiletical use of historical memory, opening the discussion into broader themes of migration, nationhood, and performing identity.