Giovanni Ciotti Selected Among 'EuropeIndia40 Leaders' 2022

16 December 2022

Photo: Ciotti/CSMC

The Europe India Centre for Business Industry has selected its '#EuropeIndia40 Leaders' for the fourth time, featuring 28 persons under the age of 40 who have made profound contributions to promoting relations between India and the EU. Among them this year is CSMC's Indologist Giovanni Ciotti.

Launched in 2019 by the Europe India Centre for Business Industry, the #EuropeIndia40 initiative is the most authoritative list of next-generation leaders playing a pivotal role in promoting EU-India relations and UK-India relations. Each year, it includes 14 women and 14 men under the age of 40 who have made outstanding contributions in various fields, such as politics, business, culture, and academia. The class of 2022 was published on 9 December during a virtual ceremony attended by representatives of the EU Embassy in India and the Indian Embassy in London. 

This year, the prestigious list also includes Giovanni Ciotti. The Indologist has been a member of CSMC since 2013. At the Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’, he is the Principal Investigator of the project ‘Towards a Comprehensive Approach to the Study of South Indian Palm-Leaf Manuscripts’. In addition, he is also the head of the ‘Palm-Leaf Manuscript Profiling Initiative’, an ambitious project in which scholars from Indology, Chemistry, and Computer Science are working on a detailed analysis of Tamil palm-leaf manuscripts whose exact provenance is unknown. Although they belong to one of the world’s great literary traditions, Tamil written artefacts have hardly been studied systematically to date. Giovanni Ciotti’s research makes an important contribution to closing this gap.

An interview with Giovanni Ciotti, in which he describes the background and aims of the ‘Palm-Leaf Manuscript Profiling Initiative’ in more detail, is available here.