Phillip Sergio is a doctoral candidate in South Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago where he is a Neubauer Family Distinguished Doctoral Fellow. He received his master’s degree from Harvard and has spent an extensive time studying in India under the auspices of the American Institute of Indian Studies and the U.S. Department of State (through the Critical Language Scholarship program). He is interested in the history of Advaita Vedanta, the making of vernacular traditions, and religious, philosophical, and literary engagements in early-modern North India. His languages of research are Sanskrit, Hindi (including its premodern literary dialects), and Persian.

Phillip’s Fulbright project is focusing on the life and oeuvre of Jaswant Singh, the 17th-century king of Marwar, a figure who excellently exemplifies a new kind of engagement with Advaita Vedanta. Not only was Jaswant Singh a politically influential Rajput king with important ties to the Mughals, he was also a distinguished poet and intellectual. He engaged with classical Sanskrit works and composed numerous original works on Vedantic philosophy in Brajbhasa. Through a study of these primary works, as well as of Hindi literary histories and Rajasthani and Persian court chronicles, this project is intending to fill an important gap in the study of early-modern courtly culture and vernacular Vedanta.