Prof. Dr. Eva Wilden

Eva Wilden studied Indology and Philosophy at the University of Hamburg, where she took a doctorate on Vedic ritual and afterwards specialised in Classical Tamil under the guidance of S.A. Srinivasan. Her habilitation, Literary Techniques in Old Tamil Caṅkam Poetry: The Kuṟuntokai was published in 2006. From 2003-2017 she was employed as a researcher at the École Française d’Extrême-Orient in Pondicherry, which for a number of years gave her the occasion to study daily with the late lamented T.V. Gopal Iyer. She is the head of the Caṅkam Project, occupied with the digitisation and edition of Classical Tamil manuscripts and organiser of a yearly Classical Tamil Summer/Winter Seminars in Pondicherry and now also Hamburg. From 2014 to 2019 she was PI of the ERC Advanced grant NETamil. Since 2017 she is a professor of Classical Tamil and Manuscript Studies at the Universität Hamburg and a member of the Cluster of Excellence Understanding Written Artefacts the Hamburg Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures. Since January 2023 she is the director of the long-term academy project Tamilex, scheduled for 24 years.