Indo-European Studies celebrates fellowships, teaching position for doctoral candidates, alumni

Sean Brenner | June 29, 2026

Two doctoral candidates and two recent alumni from the UCLA Program in Indo-European Studies, known as PIES, will embark on the next phase of their careers this autumn — three with fellowships in the U.S., Belgium and India, and one in a teaching position in Japan.

We asked each of the scholars for brief descriptions of their projects and positions.

Anahita Hoose earned her doctorate from UCLA in 2022 and was a UCLA lecturer in Jainism and South Asian religions for two years. She will spend the next year at the International School for Jain Studies in Pune, India.

“Jainism, one of the world’s oldest living religions, has a very rich cultural heritage, including many ancient writings of different kinds,” Hoose said. “I will be using my knowledge of Jain works to contribute to ISJS’s mission of promulgating the academic study of Jainism.”

Valentina Lunardi will complete her doctorate this fall before beginning a fellowship at Ghent University in Belgium.

“My fellowship project studies linguistic differences in the Latin found in medieval manuscripts from Lotharingia, a region where Romance and Germanic languages were in contact,” she said. “By using computational methods to compare patterns in sentence structure across these manuscripts, I will aim to show how those differences reflect local linguistic environments, scribal practices, and the ways texts were transmitted and rewritten in the 10th century.”

Alex Roy earned his doctorate in June 2025; his thesis examined complex verb constructions in premodern Indo-Iranian languages. In October, he’ll begin teaching at Kyoto University.

“I will be teaching mainly Sanskrit grammar and texts in the original and advising research in Indological and transcultural studies,” he said.

Paolo Sabattini is completing his doctorate as part of PIES’ integrated M.A./Ph.D. program. He received a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, which will support his work for two years as a visiting scholar at Princeton University. (His faculty host at Princeton will be another PIES alumnus, Jesse Lundquist.)

“The project explores how the Ancient Greek language was structured, written and shaped into poetic form by its earliest users,” Sabattini said. “Focusing on Greek as it was spoken, composed and recorded during the second and first millennia B.C.E., it examines how speakers organized sounds into syllables and how those patterns influenced both the first Greek writing system and the language of the earliest Greek poetry.”