Dr. Alvappillai Veluppillai, Ph.D (Sri Lanka); D.Phil (Oxford); Honorary Doctor (Uppsala). former Professor of Tamil at Peradeniya and Jaffna universities, Sri Lanka.  He has been a Senior Fellow of the Dravidian Linguistic Association in Thiruvananthapuram (1973-74), Visiting International Professor at the International Institute of Tamil Studies in Chennai (1980), Commonwealth Scholar in the Dept. of Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh (1981-82), Guest Professor in the Dept. of History of Religions at the University of Uppsala (1990-2000), Lecturer in Tamil at the University of Virginia (2000-02), and Faculty Associate in  the Department of Religious Studies at Arizona State University (2002-  ). His main interest is in working on the history of all aspects of Tamil, such as language, literature, religion (including Buddhism and Jainism) and other fields of culture. Some of his most well-known publications are Tamiḻar Camaya Varalāṟu (1980), A study of Dialects in Inscriptional Tamil (1976), and Buddhism among Tamils in Pre-Colonial Tamiḻakam and Īḻam (2002), co-edited with Peter Schalk.