Dr. Shobhana Lakshmi Chelliah is Distinguished Research Professor of Linguistics and associate dean of research and advancement at the College of Information, University of North Texas (UNT). She received her PhD in linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin. She was a program director for the US National Science Foundation’s Documenting Endangered Languages Program from 2012–2015. Dr. Chelliah has received funding from the National Science Foundation and fellowships from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She is also the director of the Computational Resource for South Asian Language Archive (CoRSAL) at the UNT Digital Library. Her publications include A Grammar of Meithei (Mouton, 1997) and Handbook of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork (Springer 2011) as well as many articles on Tibeto-Burman language structure and methodologies for language description and documentation. Stemming from her own linguistic fieldwork in areas of political conflict, she is interested in exploring the best ways to use the strengths of language documentation so as to understand types of language endangerment.

Dr. Chelliah’s Fulbright-Nehru project investigates a method of collection and custodial archiving of diverse Indian languages; it integrates training in language documentation and the creation of archival-quality collections. The project builds long-lasting bonds between India and the United States as this replicable methodology can be used to set up sister archives and portals of access at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and the University of North Texas.