Rajesh Kumar is a Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai. He obtained his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining IIT Madras, he taught at IIT Kanpur and IIT Patna in India, as well as at the University of Texas at Austin in the USA. He has also been a Visiting Faculty member at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. His book The Syntax of Negation and the Licensing of Negative Polarity Items was published by Routledge in their prestigious series Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics in 2006. He is currently Associate Editor of the journal Language and Language Teaching. He has been actively involved in language teaching programs at all the institutions with which he has been affiliated. The broad aim of his research is to uncover the regularities underlying both the form (what language is) and the sociolinguistic functions (what language does) of natural languages.
Karthika Sathyanathan is currently pursuing her doctoral studies in Linguistics in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Madras. She has worked as a language education consultant with several government departments and non-governmental organizations and is presently a Senior Project Officer at IIT Madras. Her areas of interest include English Language Teaching (ELT), multilingualism, multiculturalism, and second language learning.