Associate Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College
Biography
I study the literary and intellectual traditions of South Asia, including works composed in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Apabhramsha, Kannada, and Chinese, mostly falling within the first millennium of the common era. My research has focused on the “question of language”: the availability and choice of certain languages for certain purposes, and the role of language in cultural production and change.
Current projects include:
- With Sarah Pierce Taylor, an edition and translation The Way of the Poet-King (Kavirājamārgaṁ), a manual for composing literature in Kannada, one of the regional languages of South India. It was written in the 870s and hence is the oldest Kannada text to survive, apart from inscriptions. This project has been supported by an NEH “Scholarly Editions and Translations” grant.
- With Naresh Keerthi, an edition and translation of two plays composed by the 8th-century poet Māyurāja, namely Udayana the Ascetic (Tāpasavatsarāja) and Raghu’s Exalted Descendants (Udāttarāghava).
- A monograph on theories of memory in South Asia, focusing on concepts such as the trace (saṁskāra), decay (pramōṣa), retention (dhāraṇa), and the role of memory in debates about mindfulness, the existence of the self, and epistomology.
- A monograph on theories of context in Indian philosophy of language, focusing on concepts such as information structure (given vs. new information) and relational meaning. Sources include primarily Mīmāṁsā authors (Śabara, Kumārila, Prabhākara, and Śālikanātha) as well as Alaṅkāraśāstra authors (Mahimabhaṭṭa and Mammaṭa).
Other areas of interest: verse and meter (especially in Prakrit, Apabhramsha, Kannada, and Javanese); poetics and alaṅkāraśāstra; pragmatics; philosophy of language; Mīmāṁsā; literary history; intellectual history; philology.