Dr. Reetika Negi is an independent researcher and has a keen interest in the role of language in education and knowledge building, preservation, and dissemination. Currently, she is researching on the status of the regional languages like Kumaoni and Garhwali at the school level and in higher education.
She has completed her PhD and master’s in linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She received UGC NET-JRF scholarship in linguistics from 2015 to 2020. Her PhD thesis focused on aspects of representation, identity, and agency of Kumaoni women in folklore and literary/oral traditions of the region. It explored the relation between language and gender and presented a sociolinguistic assessment of women’s linguistic/cultural practices and traditional knowledge systems.
As a teaching assistant at the Centre for Linguistics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, she taught an introductory course on linguistics to undergraduate students. She has worked as a linguist with Panlingua Language Processing LLP on audio transcription and corpus building on Kumaoni and Hindi languages. She is also an active member of Linguistic Society of India and the Society for Endangered Languages, India.
As a Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant, Dr. Negi will teach Hindi at Brown University. She is keen on getting a hands-on experience of the higher education system in the U.S. and learn more about American culture. At the same time, she wishes to teach students more about the nuances of Hindi, India’s linguistic and cultural diversity and work towards expanding her scholarship and teaching skills.