Education
Brown University; University of Calcutta. Bethune College.
Brown University; University of Calcutta. Bethune College.
She was educated at the Bethune College, Kolkata, India, and later at the University of Calcutta. Her first job was as a newscaster for Doordarshan. She earned two doctorates from the University of Calcutta in comparative philology and in linguistics from Brown University.
She has taught at the University of California at Los Angeles and at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and would later work as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.
She is a fellow of Somerville College, Oxford and has, until recently been a professor at the University of Konstanz.
In 2007 she was elected a Member of the Academia Europaea and in 2010 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.