Fabrizio Ferrari is professor of the History of Religions and, since October 2020, president of the MA in Religious Studies.

EDUCATION
Prof Ferrari graduated in 2000 in Oriental Languages and Literatures at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, where he studied Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit and Persian languages and literatures. Since 1998 he has devoted himself to the study of Bengali language and literature, with sojourns at Bengali institutions such as Visva-Bharati University in Shantiniketan and Jadavpur University in Kolkata. He then worked as a linguistic mediator in primary and secondary schools in Venice until September 2001, when he enrolled as a doctoral candidate in the PhD programme of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His research project was initially funded by the AHRB (Arts and Humanities Research Board) and then by a SOAS Student Research Fellowship. In 2005 he obtained his Ph.D. with a thesis on the Śūnyapurāṇa, a Middle Bengali text attributed to Rāmāi Paṇḍit, and on the mythological and ritual culture of the Gājan of Dharmaṭhākur.

TEACHING
At SOAS, Fabrizio Ferrari was Teaching Assistant (South Asian Religions and Religious Studies) and Post-doctoral Research Associate in the Study of Religions. In 2007 he obtained the post of Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Chester where, in 2012, he was appointed Professor of Religious Studies. In 2018 he joined the Department of Historical, Geographical Sciences and the Ancient world of the University of Padua.

RESEARCH
Prof Ferrari’s research follows two trajectories: (1) the study of the religious culture of medieval Bengal through Maṅgal’kābya literature and bhakti texts; (2) the study of the medical tradition and ritual healing in India, with particular reference to magical culture, Āyurveda and forms of treatment developed in tantric milieus.

Notices