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 (Oxford University Press, 2022), Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality: Sri Ramakrishna and Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2018), and The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency: Revaluating German Aesthetics from Kant to Adorno (Bloomsbury, 2013). He is the editor of The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedānta (2020) and co-editor, with Benedikt Paul Göcke, of Panentheism in Indian and Western Thought: Cosmopolitan Interventions (Routledge, forthcoming). He is also the editor of two special issues of the International Journal of Hindu Studies, one on "Vedāntic Theodicies" (December 2021) and one on "Swami Vivekananda as a Cosmopolitan Thinker" (April 2023). He has published over thirty articles in such journals as Philosophy East and West, Journal of Indian Philosophy, Religious Studies, The Monist, Kantian Review, Journal of Religion, Journal of World Philosophies, European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, History of European Ideas, Religions, PMLA, and Journal of the History of Ideas.
He has been invited to lecture at Princeton University, Oxford University, WWU Münster, École Normale Supérieure, University of Edinburgh, Waseda University (Japan), and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, among other institutions. He earned his PhD in 2009 from the University of California at Berkeley, where he specialized in German aesthetics. He was also a Fulbright Scholar at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2006–7) and a Visiting Student at Magdalen College, Oxford University (2000–1).
He is currently working on two book projects. An All-Embracing Oneness: Sri Aurobindo's Integral Advaita and the Legacy of Sri Ramakrishna, under contract with Oxford University Press, will be the third book in his "Integral Advaita" trilogy. Karma and Rebirth in Hinduism, under contract with Cambridge University Press, will be published in the new series Cambridge Elements in Global Philosophy of Religion.
