Bernard Bate - Anthropology, Yale University
Specialist in Tamil South Asia, language, politics, gender and historical ethnography of language. Previous research examined political and literary oratory in the contexts of its production in Madurai, Tamilnadu. Ph.D. Chicago, 2000.
Sascha Ebeling - Tamil Literature, University of Chicago
Specialist in modern and classical Tamil language and literature, in particular nineteenth-century literary culture; South Indian cultures; religion in Angkorean Cambodia; and comparative literary studies.
Lakshmi Holmström - Writer and Translator Fellow at University of East Anglia, 2003-06. Author of Indian Fiction in English: The Novels of R. K. Narayan (1973), a re-telling of the Silappadikaram and Manimekalai (1996), and editor of The Inner Courtyard: Short Stories by Indian Women (1990). Her main work has been in translating the prose of the major contemporary writers in Tamil.
K.P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro - Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences Their documentaries have been screened widely at national and international film festivals. They have won thirteen national and international awards, and are actively involved with Films for Freedom, which is a campaign of documentary filmmakers in India against censorship, and is associated with alternative media groups. They have both received the Howard Thomas Memorial Fellowship in Media Studies, and serve as visiting faculty to several leading media and design institutions across India.
James Lindholm - Tamil Language, University of Chicago Lecturer of Tamil. Author of A Basic Tamil Reader and Grammar with K. Paramasivan. Scholar of Linguistics who earned the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago in 1975.
Paula Richman - Religion, Oberlin College Author of Extraordinary Child: Poems from a South Indian Devotional Genre (1997). Editor of Questioning Ramayanas: A South Asian Tradition (2001), and co-editor with Norman Cutler of The Gift of Tamil: Translations of Tamil Literature. Earned the Ph.D. degree from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago in 1983.
David Shulman - South Indian Literatures, University of Chicago and Hebrew University of Jerusalem Specialist in the history of religion in South India; poetry and poetics in Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit; Tamil Islam; Dravidian linguistics; and Carnatic music. Recently, co-author of Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600-1800 (2003), and author of The Wisdom of the Poets: Studies in Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit (2001).
Sam Sudanandha - Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University
Former Principal and Head of the Department of Tamil, American College, Madurai, and research scholar in Tamil Literature, Anthropology and Folk Art performances. He has taught Tamil language at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Washington. He is graciously serving as interpreter for Salma during the COSAL conference.
A.R. Venkatachalapathy - History and Literary Historiography, Madras Institute of Development Studies Specialist in social, cultural, and intellectual history, literary historiography, and social and cultural change. Former Charles Wallace Visiting Fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge. Recently, author of In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History (2006), and a Tamil translation of Pablo Neruda’s poems (2005).