My name is Preetham Sridharan and I am a fifth-year PhD candidate in modern German and European history at the University of Oregon. I am originally from India and I completed my schooling there, before starting my university education in the U.S. I have a master's degree in history from Portland State University, which I completed in 2018. I focused on modern German history out of my interest in getting to know other cultures and their histories. My research area involves the history of linguistic thought in nineteenth-century Germany, and how the field of linguistics became a professional discipline at that time emphasising Indo-European languages. My methodological approach concentrates on the history of ideas regarding theories of language. After completing my oral field exams in modern European history, I am focusing my dissertation on German Romantic thinkers (such as Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ferdinand Bernhardi, and the Schlegel brothers) and their theories about perfection and improvements in language. I am questioning the evolution of theories of perfect languages, which Umberto Eco had written about in his text on the history of such theories. My language proficiency includes English, German, Tamil, and some French. I work as a graduate employee in history at the University of Oregon and have also worked as an English teacher in India for a few summers in the past decade. I have also been a German instructor for one term at the UO.
