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What do you teach at Ca’ Foscari? What are your main research interests? 
At Ca' Foscari I teach Indo-Aryan Linguistic and Hindi Language for the Bachelor's degree programme (Language, Culture and Society of Asia and Mediterranean Africa) and Languages, Identities and Boundaries in South Asia for the Master's degree programme (Language and Civilisation of Asia and Mediterranean Africa). My main research interests are modern Indo-Aryan diachronic linguistics in the Indian subcontinent, focusing on the evolution of morphosyntactic case marking of main sentence arguments. After my degree in Modern Foreign Languages and Literature (oriental curriculum) and my PhD in Indian and Tibetan Studies, both in Turin, I taught Hindi language as adjunct professor first at the University of Turin and then at Ca' Foscari University of Venice.

What led you to pursue a research career? What are you most passionate about in your field of study? 
Without a doubt, the desire to satisfy my thirst for knowledge in my areas of study. Of the latter, more specifically Indo-Aryan Linguistic, what fascinates me most is the study, starting with ancient and modern Indo-Aryan languages, of the consequences of their linguistic interaction throughout history with other languages in South Asia, some of which belong to different language families.

What does teaching at the university mean to you?
For me, teaching at the university essentially means having the opportunity to teach young people about the disciplines that I am so passionate about, because the learning process for these young people is never a one-way process. In fact, I firmly believe that university life lets us teachers be continuously engaged by the young students who, in many cases, will be our future young researchers and scholars.

You work in a department dealing with non-European worlds: what does working on cultural diversity mean to you in an increasingly interconnected world?
I believe that studying, dealing with and therefore interacting with non-European worlds, in my case with Indian subcontinent countries, is truly a privilege, since it has given me the opportunity to study cases where multilingualism, the coexistence of different cultures and civilisations in the same geographical area, in most cases even within the same urban spaces, is part of the centuries-old history of these countries. Therefore, they turn out to be a fertile field of investigation, which exploration, analysis, in some cases, is only just beginning.