Professor Suresh Canagarajah

Professor Suresh Canagarajah, a Sri Lankan Tamil scholar in the fields of sociolinguistics, literacy, and English language teaching, is currently the Evan Pugh University Professor of Applied Linguistics, English, and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is best known for introducing orientations to language and education from traditions and practices in the Global South to diversify dominant norms and policies in higher education and academia. He has played a leading role in empirically studying, theorizing, and defining the notion of translingual practice, which introduces a way of looking at communication as exceeding bounded languages and involving negotiation of diverse semiotic repertoires, including words, multimodal resources, objects, and artifacts, and material structures. He treats this ecological, ethical, and inclusive orientation to speaking and writing as part of his South Asian heritage and ancient practices in the Global South, which were later suppressed by European colonization.