Suresh Canagarajah
Athelstan Suresh Canagarajah is a Tamil-born Sri Lankan linguist and currently an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Applied linguistics, English, and Asian studies at Pennsylvania State University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 2007. His research covers World Englishes and teaching English to speakers of other languages. He has published works on translingualism, translanguaging, linguistic imperialism, and social and political issues in language education. Life. Background and education. Athelstan Suresh Canagarajah was born in the norther peninsula of Sri Lanka, Jaffna, in 1957. Much of his life in Sri Lanka was in the  middle of the political agitation, ethnic violence, and military campaigns relating to the self-determination of the Tamil community which began in 1958. Canagarajah’s schooling was in Tamil, as schools had turned to the vernacular after independence from Britain. He chose English language and literature as electives and gained admission to University of Kelaniya. His admission to the university was delayed by the riots of 1977, and his university career was punctuated by other ethnic disturbances, including the 1981 riots. After he finished his bachelors degree, he returned to Jaffna and worked part-time jobs teaching English language and  literature in the Open University of Sri Lanka, University of Jaffna, and Chundikuli Girls’ College, and worked as an assistant editor for the newly established weekly "Saturday Review", which published news about political developments in the Tamil region to Colombo and the rest of the world. After this, Canagarajah became a full-time lecturer and then head of the newly established English Language Teaching Unit at the University of Jaffna in January 1984. On leave from the University of Jaffna until 1990, Canagarajah left for graduate school in the United States in July 1985, first to Bowling Green State University , for a master's degree in English, and then to the University of Texas, Austin, for a Ph.D with a specialization in Applied Linguistics in August 1987. Career. Canagarajah’s return to Sri Lanka in 1990 coincided with the start of the Eelam War II, a new phase in the civil war in the country, and he wrote about these events and how they affected his teaching in "Creativity in Conflict Zones". He has written about his life at this time in personal essays. The way war and limited resources shaped his teaching and how they influenced local scholarly  life inform some of his early publications. His early journal articles in TESOL Quarterly, Multilingual, World Englishes, and Language in Society were written by hand in recycled paper under lamp light, as there was a power cut and other shortages resulting from the military blockade of the region. As Canagarajah had two infant daughters, he received an offer from the International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC) for his family to be taken out in a boat to the capital city by sea some time before the mass displacement of Jaffna residents . Canagarajah received an appointment as a Tenure Track Assistant  Professor in English at the Baruch College of the City University of New York in August 1994. This position enabled him to migrate with his family to the United States. In July 2007, he received an offer as the William and Catherine Craig Kirby Professor in Applied Linguistics and English at the Pennsylvania State University. He now lives in State College, Pennsylvania. Scholarship and Teaching. Canagarajah’s lifelong interest in multilingualism began with his schooling and teaching career in Sri Lanka. Though English was a coveted medium of education during the British administration, all instruction transitioned to the vernacular Tamil  after independence in 1948. Canagarajah began to recognize that textbooks and standardized examinations treated Sri Lankan English as nonstandard and the Tamil vernacular writing styles as inappropriate for academic purposes. The pressure to resolve the conflict between the divergent grammatical and rhetorical norms became urgent when Canagarajah started teaching English in the regional University of Jaffna in 1984. When he got the opportunity to teach a special First Year Composition course intended for minority students to enhance retention at Austin, he designed a classroom ethnography to study the attitudes and practices of the majority African American students in his class  as they sought to resolve this conflict in their academic writing. His study showed that the students were adopting hybrid writing strategies to mesh their vernacular in a qualified manner within the academic register. His dissertation eventually led to a 1997 publication in the flagship research journal of the professional association, College Composition and Communication, on how this hybrid writing practice might alleviate the inequalities implicit in the then-recommended educational policy of using Black English for home and switching to the “educated” register for school. It then became imperative to study how expert writers such as African American scholars  resolved the language conflicts in their own academic writing. His close analysis of the writing strategies of sociolinguist Geneva Smitherman led him to theorize her hybrid practice as “code meshing” in a College Composition and Communication article in 2006, which won the association’s Braddock Award for the best article for that year. "Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching" (Oxford UP, 1999) argued that "resistance" is a constructive term and not synonymous with "rejection". While rejection adopts non-engagement, resistance transforms English from within, infusing it with the voices and values of its users. The book won the 2000 Mina  Shaughnessy Awardfrom the Modern Language Association of America, and was shortlisted for the 2000 best book award by the British Association of Applied Linguistics. Around this time, he also moved from puzzling over classroom issues to addressing broader concerns of knowledge construction and dissemination, which he published in A Geopolitics of Academic Writing by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2002. For this book, he undertook an institutional ethnography on the academic communication and literacy practices of his colleagues in different disciplines as they published in scholarly journals. His classroom ethnographies demonstrated that rather than being a liability, their multilingualism  endowed these students with dispositions and practices that helped them negotiate diversity constructively. The many research articles that report the findings culminated with the publication in the Journal of Second Language Writing (2015), which won the award for the best article in that journal. The article demonstrated how multilingual students strategically represent their voices in academic writing. His findings have shown that communicative practices in these contexts of mobility always exceed the boundaries of named languages (such as English, Tamil, or Spanish), as speakers shuttle between languages for identities and community. He adopted the term “translingual” to capture this notion  of practices and meanings that go beyond separately structured and labeled languages. His book Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations (2013) articulates how this translingual disposition enables multilingual students and professionals to engage in critical and creative communication in supportive social spaces. The publication won the best book award from the American Association of Applied Linguistics (2016), the British Association of Applied Linguistics (2014), and the Modern Language Association of America (2015; as the Mina Shaughnessy Prize for a second time). Because the mobility paradigm was generating interest in language studies, with scholars in different countries attending to diverse  implications, he brought them together in the Routledge Handbook on Migration and Language (2017). This 590-page edited book, which featured 50 authors and 32 chapters, won the best book award from the American Association of Applied Linguistics in 2020 and was shortlisted by the British Association of Applied Linguistics in 2018.The handbook provides valuable theoretical and methodological tools for studying communication and education as characterized by flows rather than fixed structures. His second strand of mobility scholarship relates to the communication of multinational STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) professionals, and strategically brings together his research, policy, advocacy, and pedagogical  interests. Canagarajah’s publication record in translingual orientations is attested to by a bibliometric analysis published in "System" (September, 2021), whose authors conclude that Canagarajah is the "most highly cited author" in the field, and one of his articles ("Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations", 2003) "the most frequently referenced publication".