Biography
Jo works on the traditional discipline of Sanskrit grammar, especially but not exclusively as inspired by the Aṣṭādhyāyī. She focuses on the metalinguistic conventions and techniques developed by South Asian grammarians in their endeavor to describe language. She also studies the questions, assumptions, methods, and conclusions of twentieth century scholars looking at the same material. For her dissertation, she is looking particularly at what has been learned, and what can be learned, from the metalanguage used in framing rules for deriving taddhitas—secondary nominal forms—from nouns and adjectives.
Jo studied Marathi at the University of Chicago, supported by FLAS grants. Thanks to COSAS grants, she was able to study in Pune two summers (Sanskrit in 2015, Marathi in 2016) and to attend the Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics in 2017. Jo was first able to engage with the “meta” level of grammatical discourse at Oxford University. Her MSt dissertation, Paribhāṣās: Metarules in Sanskrit Grammar, was written under the supervision of James W. Benson.
Research Interests
Vyākaraṇa, grammar, paribhāṣā and metarule literature, morphology, historical linguistics, grammar.
Teaching Experience
- Instructor (First-year Sanskrit), 2018-2019.
- Writing Intern (Humanities Core: Readings in World Literature), 2019.
- Course Assistant (First- and Second-year Sanskrit), 2016-2017.
- Broad experience in adult education.
Education
Master of Studies in Oriental Studies, with distinction, Oxford University, 2013.