I work in philosophy of language and its connections to metaphysics and philosophy of mind. I'm drawn to questions such as how language is about the world and where that aboutness falls short, and what it takes for a speaker to understand what a sentence means and what such understanding involves. My research pursues these questions through classical Indian philosophy, especially Nyāya, Navya-Nyāya, and Buddhist debates about language, mind, and knowledge, which I aim to bring into conversation with contemporary philosophy of language. I'm particularly interested in how classical Indian philosophers began from different starting points than c…
I work in philosophy of language and its connections to metaphysics and philosophy of mind. I'm drawn to questions such as how language is about the world and where that aboutness falls short, and what it takes for a speaker to understand what a sentence means and what such understanding involves. My research pursues these questions through classical Indian philosophy, especially Nyāya, Navya-Nyāya, and Buddhist debates about language, mind, and knowledge, which I aim to bring into conversation with contemporary philosophy of language. I'm particularly interested in how classical Indian philosophers began from different starting points than contemporary semanticists, and how those starting points led them to ask different questions and arrive at strikingly different answers.
I'm currently a part-time lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Boston University, and a Visiting Associate at Harvard. Between AY2024 and AY2026, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy at Vassar College, where I taught both analytic philosophy and Indian philosophy. I completed my PhD in Indian Philosophy from Harvard in Nov 2024. Before Harvard, I studied Buddhist philosophy (MA) at Peking University in China. Before that, I completed my BA in philosophy and English at the University of Adelaide in Australia. I grew up in Kuching on the island of Borneo, Malaysia, and spent parts of my teenage years studying in Singapore and in West Malaysia.
