Biography
Dr. Melinda Zulejka Fodor is a scholar of Indian literature and Buddhist philosophy in Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit and Tibetan languages. Her main area of interest is Prakrit literature and poetics, and she completed her doctoral dissertation on the genre of Prakrit drama known as saṭṭaka in 2017 (EPHE-PSL). She is currently a part-time Research Lecturer at ILARA (EPHE-PSL), where she teaches Prakrit (2021-). She is particularly dedicated to promoting the study of classical Indian languages and literatures that have been neglected in academia, such as the dialects of Prakrit and their secular corpus. She taught Prakrit at the University of Aix-en-Provence in July 2022 and at the University of Roma Sapienza in May 2023.
She was also a postdoctoral fellow (EPHE-PSL) in the HisTochText project (2018-2021), funded by the European Research Council. Her main task was to catalog the Pelliot collection of Sanskrit manuscripts at the French National Library (BnF). The Pelliot Sanskrit collection comprises a total of 2,794 fragments, including 16 small blocks of leaves and 1,416 small fragments. Due to the unforeseen circumstances caused by the Covid19 lockdowns and the expiration of her postdoctoral contract, she was unable to finalize and publish it: 938 of the 1,362 planned have been catalogued. She was the recipient of fellowships from the Gonda Foundation (2018), EFEO (2015) and HéSam (2015), conducting research on Prakrit manuscripts, and she was honored with the prestigious Hungarian Republic Fellowship in 2005 for her outstanding achievements and excellent academic performance (TKBF).
Statut
Adjunct Part-time Lecturer-Researcher
Affiliation: EPHE-PSL, ILARA, GREI.
