Letizia Trinco works as a postdoctoral researcher in the Nilgiri Archaeological Project (2021-2026). She specialises in history of art and archaeology of South and Central Asia. She holds a BA and a MA in Oriental Languages and Cultures from the Italian Institute of Oriental Studies, Sapienza University of Rome, where she studied Hindi, Bengali and Sanskrit. Her PhD dissertation (2015) focussed on a variety of South Asian funerary artefacts commonly known as “hero-stones”.
She participated in the Uzbek-Italian Archaeological Mission to the site of Uch Kulakh (oasis of Bukhara), Uzbekistan, and has experience conducting archaeological surveys in different regions of India as a research assistant and postdoctoral fellow at Sapienza University of Rome (2016-2019).
Her interests include funerary archaeology, religious iconography, and environmental history, with a focus on the pre-modern period of Western and South India (Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala).
As a member of GCSAS, she also works on the project Excavations at Bodhgaya, the Site of the Buddha's Enlightenment (2021-2024 ongoing), for which she curates the digitisation of artefacts from five museum collections between India and Europe, in collaboration with the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities.
