Shikaripur Sridhar
SUNY Distinguished Service Professor
HUMANITIES 1119
Biography
Professor S.N. Sridhar
Professor Shikaripur Narayanarao Sridhar is SUNY Distinguished Service Professor, Professor of Linguistics and India Studies in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies and founding Director of the Mattoo Center for India Studies at Stony Brook University, where he has been teaching since 1980.
He graduated from Central College, Bangalore University, with a B.A. Honors in English (1969) and M.A. (1971) in English literature and linguistics with a first class and the first rank for the University. He did a Ph.D. in Linguistics with distinction from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1980). His thesis was “Cognitive Universals of Sentence Production: A 10-language Cross-linguistic Study,” under the direction of the renowned psychologist and father of psycholinguistics, Professor Charles E. Osgood.
Professor Sridhar is an internationally recognized expert on bilingualism, multilingualism, second language acquisition, Kannada, Indian linguistics, Indian English, World Englishes, and literary translation of Indian classics. His publications address many aspects of language, including: descriptive linguistics (reference grammar of Kannada); linguistic theory (morphology and syntax); bilingualism and multilingualism in the individual and socety (language contact and convergence; code-switching and code-mixing, intelligibility); sociolinguistics (language and identity, language modernization; language spread); psycholinguistics (sentence production, bilingual code-mixing); second language acquisition theories and their application in multilingual contexts; Indian English and World Englishes; historical linguistics (acquisition of subjecthood, contact-induced language change), and history of linguistics (Indian grammatical tradition).
He is leading an international consortium of scholars translating the crown jewel of Kannada literature, the Karnata Bharata Katha Manjari by Kumaravyasa (15th c.) into English, being published in a bilingual edition in four volumes by Harvard University Press as The Kannada Mahabharata in the Murty Classical Library series. The first volume was published in 2024. His English translation of Shankara Mokashi Punekar’s novel Gangavva, Gangamayi is under review at Penguin-Random House India. He has also translated T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land into Kannada. He is currently working on a monograph on Kumaravyasa.
Professor Sridhar is author of three books: Kannada: Descriptive Grammar (Routledge, London, 1990 and Manohar, Delhi, 2001, 320 pp.), Cognition and Sentence Production: A Cross-Linguistic Study (Springer Verlag, New York and Berlin, 1986, 120 pp.), and Indina Kannada (Contemporary Kannada, Kannada University, 1995 and Abhinava, 2009, 154 pp.). He is editor of The Kannada Mahabharata (Harvard University Press, volume 1, 2024, 725 pp.); co-editor of two reference volumes (Ananya: A Portrait of India (AIA, New York, 1997, with Nirmal K. Mattoo, 940 pp.), and Language in South Asia (Cambridge, 2008, with Braj and Yamuna Kachru, 600 pp.), and seven special issues of journals, including World Englishes, International Journal of Sociology of Language, and others, and author of over 100 articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries.
Professor Sridhar’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Mattoo Center for India Studies, Stony Brook. He has held a Senior Faculty Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies and has been designated a Senior/Superior Scholar in the Humanities by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has been a Plenary or Keynote speaker at numerous international conferences, including the Linguistic Society of India (2013 and 2022), English as a Lingua Franca conference in Medellin, Colombia (2018), International Association of World Englishes Conference in Limerick, Ireland (2019). He was President of the International Association of World Englishes from 2019-2023. He is a member of editorial boards of numerous journals, evaluator of publication projects and academic departments in linguistics and Asian studies. He was a distinguished GIAN professor of the Ministry Of Education, Government of India. He is an honorary faculty member of the school of humanities of the National Institute of Advanced Study Bangalore. He was conferred the highest faculty honor and the rank of Distinguished Service Professor by the State University of New York in 2011.
Professor Sridhar is co-founder of South Asian Languages Analysis (SALA) and organized its international conferences at Stony Brook in 1983 and 2004. He has also organized or co-organized conferences on Kannada linguistics, Dravidian Linguistics, India Studies, the Teaching of Linguistics, and Teaching of Asian Languages. He organized IAWE 25, the 25th conference of the International Association for World Englishes at Stony Brook in 1923.
Professor Sridhar, along with his wife and colleague, Professor Kamal K. (“Meena”) Sridhar and leaders of the Indian American community on Long Island, founded the Center for India Studies at Stony Brook University in 1997. He is serving as its founding Director. The Center (now renamed the Mattoo Center) is recognized a national model of Indian American community-public university partnership in developing India Studies. The Center has exposed over 25,000 students to India through about 30 courses on India per year; it sponsors seminars, conferences, distinguished lectures and performing arts series, runs a Reference Library, offers scholarships, publishes books and journals, and sponsors an active Outreach program. Working with leaders of the India American community, Professor Sridhar led the establishment of a permanent endowment for the Center, which also includes the Augustina and Nirmal Mattoo endowed Chair in Classical Indic Humanities.
In 2002, Professor Sridhar founded the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies and served as served as its Founding Chair until 2008. The department offers graduate and undergraduate programs in China, Japan, Korea, and South Asian, and Asian American studies, and teaches over 100 courses a year.
Professor Sridhar is active in the Indian as well as the Kannada community of the United States. He founded the India Society of Stony Brook in 1989 and served as its first President until 1994. He organized the Northeast Kannada Conference on Kannada in 1989, with Dr Shivarama Karanth as keynote speaker. He has served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Association of Indians in America, and the American Institute of Indian Studies, and is on the Board of Governors of the Indo-American Arts Council, New York.
Professor Sridhar lives in Stony Brook with his wife and collaborator, Professor Kamal (Meena) Sridhar, who has co-authored several papers with him. She was also on the faculty of Linguistics and Asian Studies at Stony Brook and retired in 2022. She served as Director of the Center for India Studies from 2002-2008 and continues to serve as Associate Director.
Contact: s.sridhar@stonybrook.edu Phone: (631) 632- -4030; (631) 632-9742 Website: snsridhar.com
May 26, 2024