Rakesh Ranjan is a Senior Lecturer and Director of the Hindi-Urdu Program at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics (Some Morphological and Syntactic Features of Mauritian Bhojpuri) from the University of Delhi in 1997. Dr. Ranjan began his teaching career as the Program Director of the Hindi Language Program at the American Institute of IndianStudies (AIIS) in Varanasi, India in 1994. He joined Emory University in 1999 and developed the Hindi Program there. He joined the Hindi-Urdu Program in the department of MESAAS at University in 2008. He has been teaching Hindi language, literature and linguistics to American graduate and undergraduate students for more than twenty-five years. He has also Hindi Pedagogy courses for graduate students and organized workshops for school teachers in the USA.
Dr. Ranjan is an active member of the Hindi-Urdu teaching community in the USA. He has designed and supervised many projects at the national level. His research interests include Hindi pedagogy, the South Asian diaspora, and issues of heritage learners. His recent projects include three audio-visual modular projects. They are http://hindistartalk.lrc.columbia.edu/, http://urduaiis.lrc.columbia.edu/, and https://indiafestivals.lrc.columbia.edu/. The 101 newly created Hindi and Urdu audio-visual modules are serving as innovative resources for teachers and learners of Hindi and Urdu. These stunning and colorful video clips are based on real-life situations with varied linguistic, social and cultural content. They are short, unscripted, unrehearsed, and offer samples of spontaneous and authentic speech. These modules are among the most used learning modules globally.

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