Catherine Nelli completed her BA with honors from Brown University in May 2023. There she studied Sanskrit classics, comparative literature, and international and public Affairs. Catherine also completed two senior honors theses, “On Nineteenth-Century Indology: Divergences between Sanskrit and Colonial French and English Reception of Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda” and “Between Empire and Post-Colonial Nation-Building: A Comparative Analysis of Nationalism’s Role in French India’s Decolonization in Chandernagore and Pondicherry (1947–1954)”. She is interested in colonial, transcultural literary reception, Sanskrit commentaries, and Bengali interactions with Sanskrit texts.
For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Catherine is accessing the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the Bhaktivedanta Research Center in Kolkata, the French Institute of Pondicherry, and the Records Centre archives in Puducherry. She is also working with her affiliates in the Sanskrit and comparative literature departments at Jadavpur University and the École française d’Extrême-Orient to investigate French and English colonial reception of the Gītagovinda, a classical Sanskrit love poem, in tandem and tension with intracultural Sanskrit and Bengali commentarial receptions.