Suresh Canagarajah teaches postcolonial literature, Great Works in Literature, ESL, and composition. His research interests span bilingualism, discourse analysis, academic writing, and critical pedagogy. His research articles have appeared in the professional journals TESOL Quarterly, College Composition and Communication, Language in Society, Written Communication, World Englishes, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, and Multilingua. His book Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching (Oxford University Press; 1999) won the Mina P. Shaughnessy Award (2000) by the Modern Language Association for the best "research publication in the field of teaching English language, literature, rhetoric, and composition." His subsequent book Geopolitics of Academic Literacy and Knowledge Construction (University of Pittsburgh Press; 2002) won the 2003 Gary Olson Award by the Association of the Teachers of Advanced Composition for the best book in social and rhetorical theory. Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students (University of Michigan Press; 2002) critiques dominant practices in academic literacy and argues for a place for alternative discourses. He has most recently edited a collection of articles by international scholars on responses to globalization in Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice (Erlbaum; 2005).

Suresh has won research grants from the National Endowment for Humanities (for research into the sociolinguistic challenges for immigrant communities) and the National Council of Teachers of English (for ethnographic research on the classroom culture of minority students). He won the Feliks Gross Endowment Award (1999) for the outstanding junior faculty in the CUNY system. He won the Presidential Excellence Award for Distinguished Research and Scholarship in 2004. He is currently editing the flagship journal of the international association for applied linguists, TESOL Quarterly.

Suresh hails from the Tamil-speaking northern region of Sri Lanka, and has taught in the University of Jaffna there from 1984 to 1994. He contributes to the literary and cultural activities of South Asian expatriate groups in North America and Europe. Suresh has worked as a volunteer for inner-city community service organizations in the South Bronx, Los Angeles, and Washington DC. He is the faculty advisor for the student group InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.