Akshay Aitha

Hello! My name's Akshay, and I'm currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at UT Austin. You can reach me at aitha@utexas.edu (please update your contacts if you still have my UChicago address; I will stop checking it as of 08/31/2025)

I completed my PhD at the University of Chicago in August 2025, with a dissertation entitled "Domain Effects in the Morphology and Phonology of Telugu: Boundaries between Derivation and Representation" (link below). 

As a member of the Telugu diaspora in the United States, my work focuses on Telugu and its speakers from a variety of approaches. I have done both formal analyses of Telugu grammar (ranging from syntax to morphology to semantics and considering phenomena like case, agreement, control, suppletion, and vowel harmony) and more sociolinguistic work on the relationship between language and race with the second generation of the Telugu diaspora and plan to continue both threads of work in my academic career.