Assistant Professor and Coordinator

Srinivasa Kumar N Acharya (Srini) is an Assistant Professor and heads the Department of Philosophy (DoP) at MAHE, where he oversees an interdisciplinary research project MAHE Mahabharata – computational analyses using Sanskrit Computational Linguistics in Digital Humanities. He continues to serve the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence - Manipal Centre for European Studies (MCES), Department of Languages (DoL) and Manipal Universal Press (MUP) alongside DoP, since their inception. He pursues teaching and research in Indian discourses on ethics, epistemology, metaphysics and linguistics. He is a beneficiary of the prestigious Erasmus+ Teaching Fellowship from the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM), Spain (2018) and was invited to deliver talks at European universities - Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany (2018), Metropolitní Univerzita Praha (MUP), Czechia (2015) and Latvijas Universitāte (LU), Latvia (2015). He is also a co-recipient of the Indo-Canadian Shastri grant with the University of Toronto (UoT), Canada (2021-23) for the collaborative research on Indian dialectics and argumentation. He has been instrumental in bringing out scholarly translations and publications on Indian philosophy and literature with MUP. Apart from penning a few publications, he conducted international summer schools, conferences, workshops and MILAP lit-fest by hosting scholars around the world. He developed two master’s programs in Indian philosophy and Sanskrit studies at Manipal; followed by his 15 years of training in Purnaprajna Vidyapitha Sanskrit College (affiliated to Karnataka Sanskrit University KSU), Bengaluru where he completed two masters’ in logic and aesthetics, and studied philosophy under the tutelage of Sri Vishvesha Tirtha. He also holds another master’s in Sanskrit and a bachelor’s in library and information sciences (BLISc) from Karnataka State Open University (KSOU), Mysuru. Further, he pursued his PhD (2010-21) in Nyaya philosophy at Central Sanskrit University (CSU), New Delhi, under the guidance of Prof Dr Prahalada Char, Prof Dr Pandurangi and Prof Dr Varakhedi. The doctoral research thesis, written in Sanskrit, involves a textual analysis of a 16th-century seminal work dealing with the philosophy of language in Indian epistemology.

Qualification: PhD in Navya-Nyaya; MA in Navya-Nyaya, Alankara and Sanskrit; BA in Navya-Nyaya; BLISc in Library and Information Sciences; PG Diploma in Tantra-shastra (Pravara & Pravina); Diploma in Computer Applications; Certificate course - French and German (A1)