Swami Medhananda is a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and an academic philosopher, currently serving as Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Vedanta Society of Southern California in Hollywood. He is also the Hindu Chaplain at both UCLA and the University of Southern California.
He is Section Editor for the International Journal of Hindu Studies (Springer), overseeing submissions in Hindu and Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion. From 2010 to 2021, he was Associate Professor and Head of the Program in Philosophy at the Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute in Belur Math, West Bengal. His current research focuses on global philosophy of religion, cosmopsychism, religious epistemology, Indian scriptural hermeneutics, and Vedāntic philosophical traditions, especially the philosophies of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, and Sri Aurobindo.
He is the author of three books: Swami Vivekananda’s Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism, Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality: Sri Ramakrishna and Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion, and The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency: Revaluating German Aesthetics from Kant to Adorno.
He is the editor of The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedānta and co-editor, with Benedikt Paul Göcke, of Panentheism in Indian and Western Thought: Cosmopolitan Interventions. He is also the editor of two special issues of the International Journal of Hindu Studies, one on “Vedāntic Theodicies” and one on “Swami Vivekananda as a Cosmopolitan Thinker”.
