Tyler Richard

Tyler M. Richard is a translator and scholar of South Asian literature. He received his AB and AM from Harvard University, where he is currently a PhD candidate in South Asian studies and comparative literature. In addition to completing his doctoral work, Tyler also serves as an Assistant Professor of Instruction in Sanskrit & Tamil at the University of Texas at Austin. 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, and “untranslatables” in Sanskrit literature. 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. 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.