Dr Manasvin Rajagopalan (he/they) holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, with a Designated Emphasis in the Study of Religion, from the University of California, Davis, where he also completed his Masters. Focusing on the premodern and early modern expressive cultures of South Asia and Western Europe– specifically France, he is interested in theatrical and multimodal performance history, criticism, and literary aesthetics. His doctoral work interrogated methodologies of comparison across cultural and spatio-temporal discontinuities and disconnections, mobilising Tamil poetics to read French canonical texts. Manasvin’s research interests run the gamut of the interdisciplinary humanities, including art history, translation studies, food studies, performance studies, queer studies, religious studies, medical humanities, environmental humanities, and the social sciences. His work has previously been supported by generous funding from the College of Letters and Sciences at UC Davis, and the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies, among others. 

Manasvin’s research trajectory was established at the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts in Pune, where he earned his BA in Liberal Arts, majoring in Psychology, with minors in Anthropology and Peace & Conflict Studies. As such, he sees himself as a comparative generalist, and showcases this breadth of interdisciplinary interest in his teaching and research. Supportive of scholarship in the public humanities, he has been a regular contributor to the American Academy of Religion’s public book review site— Reading Religion. 

While at UC Davis, Manasvin participated in Intercampus Exchanges with the University of California, Berkeley, and was a student at both the South Asia Summer Language Institute at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, and the American Institute for Indian Studies’ Language Programs. He is a former fellow at the National Humanities Center, specialising in online pedagogy. 

His teaching at UCD included thematic courses on ancient and classical literature, medieval and early modern literature, as well as South Asian literature. He also assisted in courses in Classics, as well as Religious Studies. 

Manasvin is a member of the American Comparative Literature Association, the American Academy of Religion, the American Council for Southern Asian Art, and the Society for Interdisciplinary French Seventeenth-Century Studies. 

South Asia, Early Modern France, Critical Comparative Theory, Translation, Social History, Poetics, Spatiality, Religion, Aesthetics, Politics, Materiality, Performance, Interdisciplinary Research.