Ajay Rao is Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies and the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. His areas of research include Sanskrit intellectual history, Sanskrit literature, and religion in South India. His first book, Re-figuring the Ramayana as Literature: A History of Reception in Premodern India focused on traditional hermeneutics and the pre-colonial prehistory of the modern emergence of this epic as a foundational religious text. He is currently engaged in collaborative research projects on the “Age of Vedanta” and “Sultanate Sanskrit”.