Former Ph.D. Student Anne Keßler-Persaud

Anne Keßler-Persaud graduated in Indology and Anthropology from the University of Göttingen, writing her master’s thesis on the basis of field research conducted in Himachal Pradesh. She subsequently worked as academic staff at the Department of Indology and Tibetology of the University of Göttingen (2008‒2020) and taught ERASMUS courses at the Universities of Oslo, Vienna and Zurich. 

Anne’s research focuses on Indian philology and interdisciplinary approaches to myth and ritual; she works mainly on Vedic and Hindu texts and traditions, including the Gṛhyasūtras, Indian comics and classical dance.

She completed her doctorate at the University of Heidelberg (2016‒2023) under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Axel Michaels and Prof. Dr. Ute Hüsken. In her dissertation, which was awarded summa cum laude, Anne applied text-linguistic and hermeneutic methods to provide a detailed analysis of the Ṛgvedic wedding hymn. She demonstrated that this text ‒ previously considered a loosely assembled collection of wedding-related verses ‒ exhibits a sophisticated metrical and rhetorical structure, poetically conveying a coherent sequence of the wedding ritual of the goddess Sūryā. Anne‘s dissertation will be published under the title Sūryās Hochzeit: Kohärenz von Text und Ritual im Ṛgveda (10.85) as volume 28 of the series Monographien zur indischen Archäologie, Kunst und Philologie.