Dr Giobvanni Ciotti

Giovanni Ciotti (b. 1982) completed both his B.A. and M.A. in Asian and African Studies in Italy, at the University of Bologna. He then earned his Ph.D. in South Asian Studies (Sanskrit) at the University of Cambridge in 2013. In 2007 he began to study Classical Tamil at the EFEO in Pondicherry. Since 2013 he has joined the University of Hamburg as a research associate, first at the SFB950 “Manuscript Cultures in Asia, Africa and Europe” and then at the department of Indian and Tibetan Studies. He is now a principal investigator at the newly established Cluster of Excellence “Understanding Written Artefacts” at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures with a project entitled “Towards a Comprehensive Approach to the Study of South Indian Palm-Leaf Manuscripts”.

Within the scope of NETamil he has investigated the following topics (see publications):

• the distribution of Tamil grammatical texts in multiple-text and composite manuscripts;
• manuscripts reflecting the interaction between Tamil and Sanskrit;
• colophons in manuscripts produced in Tamil Nadu written in both Tamil and Tamilian Grantha scripts.

Publications

• [forthcoming 2020] “Tamil Ilakkaṇam (Grammar) and the Interplay between Syllabi, Corpora, and Multiple-text Manuscripts”. In Giovanni Ciotti, Martin Delhey, Stefanie Brinkmann and Stefano Valente (eds) Education Materialized: Reconstructing Teaching and Learning Contexts through Manuscripts. Studies in Manuscript Cultures. Berlin: De Gruyter.
• [forthcoming 2020] G.C. and R. Sathyanarayanan. “Between Manipravalam and Tamil: The Case of the Viṣṇupurāṇavacaṉam and Its Recensions ” (Studies in Late Tamil Manipravalam Literature 3)”. In Giovanni Ciotti and Erin McCann (eds) Linguistic and Textual Aspects of Multilingualism in South India and Sri Lanka. Pondicherry: IFP/EFEO.
• [in press] G.C. and R. Sathyanarayanan. “A multilingual commentary of the first verse of the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana as found in ms. IFP RE22704 (Studies in Late Tamil Manipravalam Literature 1)”. In Suganya Anandakichenin and Victor D’Avella (eds) The Commentary Idioms of the Tamil Learned Traditions. Pondicherry: IFP/EFEO. 
• [forthcoming 2020] G.C. and R. Sathyanarayanan. “Between Manipravalam and Tamil: The Case of the Viṣṇupurāṇavacaṉam and Its Recensions ” (Studies in Late Tamil Manipravalam Literature 3)”. In Giovanni Ciotti and Erin McCann (eds) Linguistic and Textual Aspects of Multilingualism in South India and Sri Lanka. Pondicherry: IFP/EFEO.
• [forthcoming 2020] G.C. and Erin McCann (eds) Linguistic and Textual Aspects of Multilingualism in South India and Sri Lanka. Pondicherry: IFP/EFEO.
• 2017 “Teaching and Learning Sanskrit through Tamil Evidence from Manuscripts of the Amarakośa with Tamil Annotations (Studies in Late Manipravalam Literature 2)”. In Vincenzo Vergiani, Daniele Cuneo, and Camillo Alessio Formigatti (eds) Indic Manuscript Cultures through the Ages: Material, Textual, and Historical Investigations, pp. 193–222. Berlin - Boston: De Gruyter.
• G.C: and Jonas Buchholz. “What a Multiple-text Manuscript Can Tell Us about the Tamil Scholarly Tradition: The Case of UVSL 589”. In manuscript cultures 10 (2017), pp. 129–144.
• G.C. and Marco Franceschini. “Certain Times in Uncertain Places: A Study on Scribal Colophons of Manuscripts Written in Tamil and Tamilian Grantha Scripts”. In Ciotti, Giovanni and Hang Lin (eds) Tracing Manuscripts in Time and Space through Paratexts, pp. 59–130. Berlin - Boston: De Gruyter.