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Swami Medhananda (Ayon Maharaj) is a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Vedanta Society of Southern California in Hollywood. He also serves as Hindu Religious Director at the University of Southern California and as 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 Vedāntic philosophical traditions, global philosophy of religion, cosmopolitan approaches to consciousness, Indian scriptural hermeneutics, and 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; South Asian edition now available at ), 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, under contract). 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“ (forthcoming). 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, Jagiellonian University, University of Edinburgh, 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 All Rights Reserved by the Original Copyright Owners. For More Videos of Monastics of the Ramakrishna Order, please Visit
