Ayesha Kidwai | Welcome to Jawaharlal Nehru University

Ayesha Kidwai

Professor

Centre/School/Special Centre

Centre for Linguistics,

School of Language Literature and Culture Studies

Room No

160

Off. Phone

011-26704218

ayesha@mail.jnu.ac.in, ayesha.kidwai@gmail.com

Personal Webpage

https://ayeshakidwai.hcommons.org/

Qualifications

PhD

Areas of Interest/Specialization

Generative syntax and morphology, child language acquisition, field and descriptive linguistics, the politics of language, history of linguistics, bilingual Hindi-English translation, equality and inclusion in higher education, Partition studies.

Experience

27 years

Awards & Honours

Elected Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2023.
Infosys Prize in the Humanities-Theoretical Linguistics in 2013.

International Collaboration/Consultancy

Senior Editor, Oxford Research Encyclopaedia, 2014-19.
Visiting Professor in a number of institutions in a number of institutions in India and abroad.

Best Peer Reviewed Publications

"Unlabeled structures and scrambling asymmetries: Hindi-Urdu style". In Samir Alam, Yash Sinha and Sadhwi Srinivas edited Proceedings of (F)ASAL-11, Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (2022).

"Imagining the multilingual university", Social Text 39.4(149), pp.110-11. (2022)

"Life to Indian Languages: A linguist responds to Javed Majeed’s study of Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India". Economic and Political Weekly, 55.42, pp.40-48.

"Languages or Mother Tongues? India’s Linguistic Diversity". In What the Nation Really Needs to Know: The JNU Lectures on Nationalism, edited by Janaki Nair, HarperCollins India [2017].

"Verb Agreement in Hindi and its Acquisition", jointly withBenu Pareek, and Sonja Eisenbeiss. In Rahul Balusu and Sandhya Sundaresan edited Proceedings of FASAL 5.

Recent Peer Reviewed Journals/Books

Books

The Dust of the Caravan (print and e-book). Zubaan and NewText. (2021)
In Freedom’s Shade (print and e-book). Penguin India (2011)
Linguistic Structure and Language Dynamics in South Asia. 2001. Co–edited with Anvita Abbi and R.S. Gupta. Motilal Banarsidas: New Delhi.
XP–Adjunction in Universal Grammar: Scrambling & Binding in Hindi–Urdu. 2000. In the Richard Kayne (edited) series on Comparative Syntax. Oxford University Press: New York.

Patents (if any)