About
Dr. Yankee Modi is a Research Associate at the University of Sydney, affiliated with the Department of Linguistics and the Sydney Centre for Language Research. She serves as Co-Director of the Centre for Cultural-Linguistic Diversity (Eastern Himalaya) and holds membership in the Vere Gordon Childe Centre.
- Education:
- BA (Hons) from Rajiv Gandhi University
- MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)
- MPhil from JNU
- PhD from University of Bern
Her research focuses on documentation and description of Tibeto-Burman languages in the Eastern Himalayas, particularly those of the Milang tribe in Arunachal Pradesh, India. She specializes in community-led language projects, cultural prehistory reconstruction through proper names, and linguistic responses to geopolitical tensions.
Recent projects include a 4-year community-led documentation initiative for 20 Eastern Himalayan languages in partnership with Firebird Foundation and University of North Texas. Publications span topics like applicative morphology, subject autonomy marking, and cultural linguistic diversity.
- Awards:
- Shortlisted finalist for 2019 Panini Award (Association for Linguistic Typology)
She advocates for indigenous researcher sovereignty and has publicly challenged Chinese geopolitical influence in academic publishing, as seen in her 2023 commentary on retracted Himalayan research.