Tyler Richard '06: Translator and Scholar of South Asian Literature at UT Austin
Tyler Richard ’06 is a translator and scholar of South Asian literature and serves as an Assistant Professor of Instruction, teaching Sanskrit and Tamil at the University of Texas in Austin. He received his AB and AM from Harvard University, where he is currently a PhD candidate in South Asian Studies and Comparative Literature.
Prior to joining UT's faculty, he taught at Columbia University, where he oversaw its Sanskrit and Tamil language programs under the supervision of Sheldon I. Pollock.Tyler’s main research interest consists in exploring how different communities—especially those in South Asia—have articulated and explored questions related to beauty, identity, language, and perception. In particular, he studies literature and literary theory written in Sanskrit and Tamil with an eye for comparison across time, space, and disciplinary method. At the moment, he is working on projects related to Bāṇa’s Kādambarī, Cīṉiccarkkarai’s Tobacco Messenger, the Sanskrit comedic monologue, and “untranslatables” in South Asia.In the summer of 2018, Tyler was a visiting fellow at Tamil University, Thanjavur, where he studied Old Tamil grammar and poetry with the scholars Ku.Ve. Balasubramaniam and A. Dakshinamurthy.
Along with Krithika Varagur, he is the joint recipient of a 2022 Exodus Exploration Without Boundaries Grant to pilot an open-access database of Chola temple inscriptions translated into both English and Modern Tamil. He is a 2022-2023 Graduate Student Associate at the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University.
Aside from his literary and Indological interests, Tyler is also passionate about real estate, entrepreneurship, and the art of gathering. His most recent publication is a Harvard Business School case study entitled “The Dance of Dharma: On the Difficulty of Being Good,” co-written with Arthur I. Segel in collaboration with Gurcharan Das. Since August 2020, he has served as Soul Searcher at Rabina, a real estate investment and development firm based in New York City.
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