Faculty

Finnian M. Moore Gerety, Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford, is a historian of Indian religions focusing on sound and mantra. He is a co-Principal Investigator for “Mantras in Religion, Media and Society in Global Southern Asia” (MANTRAMS), funded by a Synergy Grant from the European Research Council. After earning a PhD. in South Asian Studies from Harvard University, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Yale University Institute of Sacred Music and then Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. Integrating the study of premodern texts with insights from fieldwork in contemporary south India, Finn’s research explores how sound has shaped religious doctrines and practices on the subcontinent from the late Bronze Age up through today. His current book project for Oxford University Press, All This is OM: Mantra, Yoga, and the History of the Sacred Syllable in Early India, is the first-ever scholarly monograph on OM, the preeminent mantra and ubiquitous sacred syllable of Indian religions.