About
I am Visiting Faculty at Bennington college. I teach both introductory and advanced courses on topics such as language documentation and description, gesture, and linguistic typology.
I received my Ph.D. at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa where I focused my research on Austronesian languages, language documentation methods, and gesture. In my ongoing research, I aim to help both speakers and non-speakers by creating a high-quality, comprehensive audio-visual corpus. I incorporate my past experiences in the film industry and as a language teacher to improve the communication around and quality of my documentation work. Further, through my work on Hawu and Saparua, both Austronesian languages of Eastern Indonesia, I engage my native-speaker collaborators at all levels of the documentation process and encourage them to guide and continue the documentation.
My general research questions fall into four main areas:
-How can we continue to encourage community-driven language documentation efforts through community engagement and initiative?
-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 our cognitive and cultural models of the world and vice versa?
-What features of Austronesian languages can contribute to current linguistic theory?
Learn more about these research endeavors here.
News
July 1, 2023: Began 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: Successfully defended dissertation
August 6, 2020: Received NSF-DDRI award for doctoral dissertation research entitled "Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Multi-Modal Study of Gesture in a Spatial Language"
April 17, 2020: Advanced to candidacy