Faculty

Antonia Ruppel is a Classicist by training who came to Sanskrit through a series of fortunate accidents. She learnt the language as an autodidact, and one of her reasons for writing her textbook, The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit (2017), was to make the experience of studying Sanskrit easier and more pleasant for others. She published the follow-up volume, An Introductory Sanskrit Reader: Improving Reading Fluency (2021), designed to help students gain reading fluency in an enjoyable and straightforward way. She is also the co-editor of the recent Veda-Sätze – Vedic Sentences (2024), a collection of 863 short texts.

Language pedagogy is at the heart of her life. She has been teaching Sanskrit for 20 years at universities such as Cornell, Oxford, the LMU Munich, and online at Yogic Studies. She is also the host of The Sanskrit Studies Podcast.

Courses taught: 

• SKT 101 | Elementary Sanskrit I
• SKT 102 | Elementary Sanskrit II
• SKT 103 | Elementary Sanskrit III
• SKT 201 | Intermediate Sanskrit I
• SKT 202 | Intermediate Sanskrit II
• SKT 203 | Intermediate Sanskrit III
• SKT 307 | Kāvya: Meghadūta of Kālidāsa
• SKT 501 | Sanskrit Graduate Seminar
• LATIN-S 101 | Latin for Sanskritists
• LATIN 102 | The Writings of Ovid

Selected Publications: 

• 2024. Veda-Sätze – Vedic Sentences, edited by Antonia Ruppel and Bernhard Forssman, Heidelberg: Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing.
• 2021. An Introductory Sanskrit Reader: Improving Reading Fluency. Brill.
• 2017. The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit. Cambridge University Press.
• 2012. Absolute Constructions in Early Indo-European. Cambridge University Press.