 | Teaching Staff  Miquel Peralta - Director Miquel Peralta studied mathematics at the University of Barcelona but later on turned towards music and the teaching of singing. He studied at the Barcelona Conservatory of Music, and from 1986 to 1989 directed the Orfeó Català School of music. In 1990, he was admitted to the postgraduate music program at the University of Texas, where he also worked as an assistant professor. In 1992 he received a Master's degree in Music, and in 1996 he received the Doctor of Musica Arts degree with a dissertation on vocal music. His passion for the study of languages, singing, and sound led him to continue exploring this area and currently he is Professor of Foreign Languages at the Victoria de Los Angeles School of Music. After his academic experience in the United States, in 1997 he returned to Spain where he resumed his teaching work and also directed the translation department of Mercutio Vox, a film production company. In 2000, his interest for languages and for sound led him to study Sanskrit, which he began doing shortly thereafter with Oscar Pujol. This interest saw him very quickly become drawn towards teaching the language and towards the oral aspects of the language, which he then began studying with Sadananda Das, a professor at the University of Leipzig. Upon observing the difficulties faced by the majority of students who want to learn Sanskrit but lack the tools necessary to guarantee success, he founded the Devavānī Center of Sanskrit Studies in 2006, together with a group of Sanskrit scholars who shared his concern about filling the pedagogic and academic void found in Sanskrit studies in Spain. Currently he is working on a doctoral dissertation at the Autonomous University of Barcelona on the Rig Veda himns. In August of 2008 the Indian Embassy in Berlin, in collaboration with the Department of Classical Indology of Heidelberg University, honored him with the first Sarasvati Award for Essays in Sanskrit.  Laia Villegas Torras - Head of Publications Laia Villegas Torras is an Indologist with a Bachelor's degree in Humanities from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. She came into contact with Indian philosophy for the first time during her studies and was motivated to expand her knowledge of the subject. She spent a year studying Sanskrit and Indian religions at the Ca'Foscari University of Venice, Italy, on an Erasmus fellowship. Then, in the summer of 1999, she travelled to India for the first time on a scholarship from the Banaras Hindu University and met the Sanskrit scholar Oscar Pujol, who inspired her to continue her studies of the language. After graduating in the year 2000 she enrolled in postgraduate study in Languages and Cultures of India and Iran at the University of Salamanca, Spain. In 2001 she returned to Varanasi to study Sanskrit and read some of the principal literature of the Hindu tradition with Pandit Śrī Narayan Miśra. During her stay in Varanasi she began working together with Oscar Pujol on the development of the Sanskrit-Catalan Dictionary (Diccionari Sànscrit-Català, Enciclopedia Catalana, 2005). In 2002 she started a doctoral program in Humanities at Pompeu Fabra University with the aim of specializing in the Philosophy of Religion, and Indology. In 2003 she received a scholarship from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, thanks to which she was again able to go to India, this time to the city of Pune, where she did research at Jnana Deepa Vidyapeeth University and studied Sanskrit at the University of Pune. After returning from India in 2005, she joined the Sanskrit class given by Oscar Pujol at Asia House. There she met Miquel Peralta, with whom she developed a friendship and professional relationship that bore fruit a year later in the creation of Devavānī. In 2006, having completed her doctoral course work, she received the Diploma of Advanced Studies with her analytical study of the Sanskrit text Sāṃkhya Kārikā (4th Century BC). This research resulted in the publication of the text in a Catalan translation, Les estrofes del Sāṃkhya (Fragmenta, 2007) a year later. Currently she is working on her doctoral thesis examining the philosophy of the mind in the Yogasūtra of Patañjali, under the guidance of Amador Vega and Oscar Pujol. |
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