Peter Scharf

Peter Scharf earned his B.A. in philosophy at Wesleyan University and his doctorate in Sanskrit at the University of Pennsylvania, after which he taught Sanskrit at Brown University for 19 years and conducted research on the linguistic and philosophical traditions of India. Since 2011, he has held several visiting professorships and fellowships: Visiting Professor at the Maharishi International University Research Institute, International Blaise Pascal Research Chair at the University of Paris...See more

Peter Scharf earned his B.A. in philosophy at Wesleyan University and his doctorate in Sanskrit at the University of Pennsylvania, after which he taught Sanskrit at Brown University for 19 years and conducted research on the linguistic and philosophical traditions of India. Since 2011, he has held several visiting professorships and fellowships: Visiting Professor at the Maharishi International University Research Institute, International Blaise Pascal Research Chair at the University of Paris Diderot, Visiting Professor in the Department of Sanskrit Studies at the University of Hyderabad, Visiting Professor of Sanskrit in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Visiting Professor in the Language Technologies Research Center at the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad, Fellow at the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla. He is currently the director of the Sanskrit Library (sanskritlibrary.org), an international digital Sanskrit library which he founded in 2002, and Adjunct Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad. While his research focuses on the linguistic traditions of India, Vedic Sanskrit, and Indian philosophy, he has devoted considerable attention over the past several years to Sanskrit computational linguistics and building a digital Sanskrit library. He is now developing computational implementations of Paninian grammar and Paninian models of verbal cognition. Scharf is the author or editor of several books and over a hundred articles. His authored books include the first-year Sanskrit textbook Sabdabrahman: a linguistic introduction to Sanskrit; Ramopakhyana - the story of Rama in the Mahabharata: an independent-study reader in Sanskrit; -The Mahabharata in a nutshell: a one-chapter narration in forty-three verses presented as an independent-study reader in Sanskrit; and The denotation of generic terms in ancient Indian philosophy: grammar, Nyaya, and Mimasa. He recently edited a collection of research papers on Sanskrit linguistics, Vedic and related subjects in two volumes entitled Sabdanugama Indian linguistic studies in honor of George Cardona. For more information about the author and his publications, see https: //sanskritlibrary.org/cv/profile.html. See less