Alexandra Verini

Alexandra Verini is Associate Professor of English at Ashoka University. She earned her Ph.D in English at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She also holds an M.A. in English from Columbia University and a B.A. in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Professor Verini’s research focuses on medieval and early modern literature and visual culture, gender and sexuality, friendship, religion and utopia.

Her first book, English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400-1700: New Kingdoms of Womanhood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), makes the case for the vitality of women’s utopian thought in the pre-modern era, revealing how writings from medieval and early modern English convents influenced the earliest women’s utopian writing in English.

The recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant under the Governing Intimacies Project, Professor Verini co-edited, along with Ashoka colleague Abir Bazaz, the volume Gender and Medieval Mysticism from India to Europe (Routledge, 2024). She has published essays for both public and academic audiences on topics ranging from comparative mysticism to medieval queenship to friendship in the lives of nuns.

Professor Verini is currently working on several projects. The first, Learning By Heart: Women Religious and Pedagogies of Colonialism, is a cross-cultural comparative study of convent schools in colonial Canada, India and Mexico. This project explores how European women religious who ventured into colonial territories indelibly influenced the education of young women, forging pedagogical approaches that at once bolstered and challenged imperialist agendas. The second project, For the Love of God, puts medieval women’s mystical writings from different traditions into conversation in order to build a picture of how religious women theorized transhistorical concepts such as friendship, love, the body and the self. Their innovative ideas, Verini argues, can inform how we make sense of the world today.

She enjoys teachings classes on medieval mysticism, women’s writing, travel writing and detective fiction.