Murugaiyan & Parlier-Renault – South Indian Epigraphy and Art History

Édith PARLIER-RENAULT is professor of South and South Asian art history at Sorbonne Université and director of the Centre de recherches sur l’Extrême-Orient à Paris-Sorbonne (CREOPS, Paris-Sorbonne Research center on the Far East). Her main area of interest is Hindu iconography. She published a book on Deccan and South Indian temples between the 6th and the 8th centuries (Temples de l’Inde méridionale: la mise en scène des mythes, PUPS, Paris, 2006) and a general introduction to Indian Art (L’Art indien: Inde, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Asie du Sud-Est, PUPS, Paris, 2010), as well as several articles on Hindu and Buddhist sculpture.

Appasamy MURUGAIYAN received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Paris 7 (1980). He has specialised in foreign language teaching methodologies, Modern Tamil and Comparative Dravidian linguistics, Tamil epigraphy and the Tamil diasporic studies. He taught in several Universities: École Pratique des Hautes Études, University of Paris 8, School of Oriental Languages and CREOPS-Sorbonne University. He has published and edited several books and published widely in international journals and chapters in books on modern and historical Tamil linguistics, Tamil epigraphy and Tamil diaspora. His current areas of research include Tamil epigraphy, Tamil historical linguistics and identity construction among the Tamil diaspora of Francophone islands. He has completed two digital archival projects of preservation of manuscripts (17th–18th centuries) from the Bishop’s House of Jaffna funded by the Endangered Archival Programme of the British library. He is currently building a grammatical and lexical database of Tamil inscriptions, jointly organised by the Tamil Virtual Academy and CNRS-Mondes iranien et indien, Paris. He has been organising the International Workshop on Tamil Epigraphy since 2004.