Professor Sridhar was born in Shimoga, India, and received the B.A. (Honors) and M.A. degrees in English from Bangalore University. He did his Ph.D in Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been a member of the faculty at Stony Brook University since 1980.
Professor Sridhar has conducted extensive research in a number of areas of linguistics. They include bilingualism (language contact and convergence), sociolinguistics (code-switching and code-mixing, language modernization, language spread), second language acquisition (contrastive analysis, language acquisition in non-native settings), World Englishes (structure and functions of Indian English and other non-native varieties of English), teaching English as a second language (textbook for teaching English in India), descriptive linguistics (reference grammar of Kannada), theoretical linguistics (syntax of dative subjects, morphology of agglutination, level ordering, productivity), psycholinguistics (cross-linguistic experimental study of cognitive principles of sentence production), applied linguistics (scope and relation to linguistic theory), and history of linguistics (contributions of the Indian grammatical tradition).
Professor Sridhar had authored three books (Kannada (Routledge), Cognition and Sentence Production (Springer Verlag), and Indina Kannada (Kannada University) and co-edited two (Ananya: A Portrait of India (AIA), and Language in South Asia (Cambridge, in press).
Professor Sridhar was the founder and first Director of the Center for India Studies and is Professor of Linguistics and India Studies, and founding Chair of the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook.
