About
In my research I have worked with communities throughout the Pacific, but the bulk of my work has been conducted with the Hawu and Saparua language communities in eastern Indonesia.
My general research questions fall into four main areas:
- How can we continue to encourage community-driven language documentation efforts through community engagement and training?
- How can we incorporate the latest technology (e.g. video, social media, etc.) as essential language documentation tools and increase community access to these documents while maintaining high-quality standards for recordings?
- How does our environment, such as the topography or the flora and fauna, and our interactions with it shape our linguistic expression and cognitive and cultural models of the world and vice versa?
- How can we increase the study of gesture in the Pacific region, and how does the incorporation of multimodality inform current linguistic theories?
Learn more about these research endeavors here.
I have taught courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels on topics such as language documentation and description, linguistic typology, linguistic anthropology, and gesture.
Learn more about these teaching endeavors here.
Hōʻoia ʻĀina — Land Acknowledgement
I acknowledge Hawaiʻi as an Indigenous space whose original people are today identified as Native Hawaiians. Situated on lands which were ceded under duress, the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa strives to be a Native Hawaiian Place of Learning, committed to the values of aloha ‘āina. As a settler who is privileged to live and work on these lands, I seek to support the varied strategies that the Indigenous peoples of Hawai‘i are using to protect their land and their communities, and I am committed to dedicating time and resources to working in solidarity. More information about the University’s efforts to acknowledge and respond to Aloha ‘Āina can be found at the Native Hawaiian Place of Learning Advancement Office.
News
August 21, 2025: Presented at ICHL27 on the grammaticalization of Hawu verb marking. Slides can be found here
August 1, 2024: Began Assistant Professor position in Linguistics at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa
July 1, 2023: Major Documentation Grant awarded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) for the project entitled "Collaborative Documentation and Description of Saparua: An Endangered language of Maluku"
September 1, 2022: Began Visiting Faculty position at Bennington College
May 14, 2022: Graduated from the University of Hawai'i
March 1, 2022: Dissertation defense
August 6, 2020: NSF-DDRI award for doctoral dissertation research entitled "Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Multi-Modal Study of Gesture in a Spatial Language"