Dr Velupillai appointed honorary professor

Viveka Velupillai, who has been teaching and researching at the Department of English since 2005, was appointed honorary professor on 2 February  2016.
Dr. Velupillai studied Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at the University of Uppsala and received her MA in 1997. She then received a doctoral scholarship for the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where she completed her PhD dissertation on the Tense-Mood-Aspect system of Hawai’i Creole English in a typological perspective and was awarded her PhD by the University of Nijmegen in 2002.
Her areas of research include linguistic typology, contact languages as well as historical linguistics. She authored Pidgins, creoles & and mixed languages. An introduction (2015) and An introduction to linguistic typology (2012). Dr. Velupillai also contributed to the World Atlas of Language Structures and to the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures. She is a member of the Automated Similarity Judgment Program consortium and is currently one of the project managers for the Database of Early Pidgin and Creole Texts (DEPiCT). At the moment, she is working on an apparent time study of the Shetland dialect.