Dr Sonali Chunodkar is driven by an abiding fascination with why artworks are able to affect us and influence our lives in myriad ways as well as how fiction, belief, knowledge, and truth become blurred during our lived experiences. The interdisciplinary nature of her research questions has involved her deeply with areas like fantasy and science fiction, narrative theory, aesthetic response studies, and phenomenological philosophy.

After an unconventional educational path, she completed her MPhil (2015) and PhD (2020) degrees at the Department of English, Savitribai Phule Pune University, where she was a UGC Junior and Senior Research Fellow. Her MPhil thesis offered a cognitive narratological account of how J R R Tolkien’s narrative, stylistic strategies and the reader’s co-creative activity together facilitate the achievement of “secondary belief.” Her PhD dissertation attempted a Husserlian phenomenological investigation into the very possibility of belief during the act of reading in general and that of Tolkien’s fantasy fiction in particular.

She has presented at conferences organized by the World Phenomenology Institute, Husserl Archives Cologne, The Tolkien Society, and Popular Culture Association. Besides co-editing a volume on phenomenology in India (under contract with Springer), she is currently working on papers on Edith Stein, Tolkien, Indian mythological fantasy fiction in English, and theatrical experience. Her time at Krea University will be primarily devoted to exploring the ethical dilemmas arising from the performance art audience’s aesthetic experiences through the lens of Edmund Husserl and Emmanuel Levinas’s respective phenomenologies.