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TRENTO Margherita

Margherita Trento is associate professor in the history of South India at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), and currently head of the Indology Department at the French Institute of Pondicherry. She studied in Italy, France, and India, and received her PhD in 2020 from the University of Chicago. Her research interests include Tamil history, literature and religion with a focus on the “early modern” period (15th-18th centuries). She has written a book (Writing Tamil Catholicism) on the history of Catholicism in eighteenth-century Tamil Nadu, and she is now researching the history of Śaivism in the same period.

Her current research centres on the Caiva cittāntam monastery (ātīṉam) in Thiruvavaduthurai. This is famous as the place where U. Ve. Swaminatha Iyer (1855-1942), the father of the Tamil Renaissance, studied and learnt the codes of traditional Tamil scholarship under the guidance of his teacher Minakshisundaram Pillai (1815-1876). However, the earlier history of the monastery, founded in the 16th century and still in operation, remains largely unknown. Her research seeks to understand the role of this institution in the religious, social and political world of South India from the 16th to the 18th century.

Margherita Trento is part of Task force A of the DHARMA project, and in this context she edits, translate and analyse a corpus roughly one hundred copper-plate inscriptions held in Thiruvavaduthurai, which are a key-source for the early history of the ātīṉam.