Sujata Mahajan

Sujata Mahajan
Assistant Instructional Professor
Foster Hall 213
Office Hours: Wednesdays, 12:30 pm -2:50 pm & by appointment.
773.702.8373
Ph.D. (linguistics) Deccan College, 1998 MA (Marathi), University of Pune, 1985 MA (linguistics), Deccan College, Pune
Research Interests: Language and Linguistics, South Asian Languages, historical linguistics, lexicography, semantics, pragmatics, historical development of the Marathi language

Biography

Sujata Mahajan’s main interests are in mapping historical developments in the Marathi language and the influences of other languages (Kannada, Persian, etc.) on Marathi. She is also interested in developing a Marathi encyclopedic dictionary and writing a complete Marathi grammar.

Mahajan is a fiction writer and has published eight books. She started writing during her childhood and was awarded a state award for her poetry when she was as a teenager. She also received an award for a novel she composed around the same period. She has continued writing novels, poems, and short stories throughout her career and has also written about the nature and development of children’s literature in Marathi—even producing several novels for children. Some of the many poems she has written over her career have recently been included in a compilation of contemporary Marathi poems. In addition, she has translated a biography of Mahakavi Kuvempo, the famous Kannada poet, into English.

In addition to her literary pursuits, Mahajan began to pursue an interest in language itself and pursued a Ph.D. in linguistics at Deccan College in Pune (India). She specializes in stylistic variations within 19th-century Marathi poetry and is interested more generally in how humans use language. She has written at length about discourse markers in Marathi, and her work was pioneering in establishing this topic as as a site of inquiry within Indian languages. Mahajan’s forthcoming projects include producing an online encyclopedic dictionary of words that have entered standard Marathi through Dalit ātmākathans (autobiographies) written since the 1960s.

Courses

MARA 10100-10200-10300. First-Year Marathi.

MARA 20100-20200-20300. Second-Year Marathi.

MARA 30100-30200-30300. Third-Year Marathi. 

MARA 15005. Advanced Marathi in India.

 

Publications

2017     Shaharatla Pratyek'–– (Short Stories) published by 'Granthali Prakashan',  Mumbai

2016     Swatahatlya Parastreechya Shodhat' -Poems published by Continental Prakashan, Pune

2008     'Ithech, Ya Kshanat' – (Short Stories) published by 'Padmagandha Prakashan',   Pune

Subject Area: Marathi