Embarking down the YaguasYaku river in the Peruvian Amazon
RESEARCH OVERVIEW
My research draws upon externally-funded fieldwork and incorporates work on Spanish, English, Modern Greek, and Brazilian Portuguese. Additionally, I am working on a number of projects which analyze Spanish in contact with endangered languages of the Peruvian Amazon, including Ocaina, Bora, and Yagua. My work has appeared in journals such as Spanish in Context, Probus, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics and Boletín de Filología. Recently, I have contributed a co-authored chapter (with Kimberly Geeslin and Bret Linford) to the volume Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish: A Cross-dialectal perspective, edited by Ana M. Carvalho, Rafael Orozco and Naomi Shin. Currently, I am finishing a manuscript with John Benjamins entitled “Amazonian Spanish: Language Contact and Evolution” for which I am the sole editor.
I am increasingly gearing my investigations, and those of the students I mentor, toward community-engaged scholarship. Through this research, we are able to incorporate the growing Hispanic population in the U.S. as an integral component of our learning community. For example, my first year as a tenure-track professor I began to work with local communities and schools in order to document the effectiveness of Spanish/English dual-language immersion instruction. In so doing, I am expanding the impact of my scholarship by addressing issues of language attrition, bilingual education, and second dialect acquisition. I have recently submitted a grant application to fund fieldwork opportunities to continue this line of investigation.
LINGUISTIC FIELDWORK ABROAD
Buenos Aires, Argentina: May 2013
Collected oral narrations, written contextualized questionnaires, and demographic information as part of project on morphosyntactic variation in Latin America. Funding provided by NSF research grant. Data has been analyzed for conference presentations and publication submission.
Lima, Perú: August 2012
Hosted by the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, collected film narrations and demographic information as part of a larger project on the identification of dialect regions of Peruvian Spanish. Funding provided by IU Tinker grant.
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: June-August 2011
Fieldwork and data collection with native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. Data is currently being analyzed as part of a project on cross-language syntactic variation between Spanish, English, and Portuguese. Results presented at national conferences and accepted for publication.
Peruvian Amazon: May-June 2011
Lived among five different indigenous communities, collected sociolinguistic interviews and demographic information with Project Amazonas’ language revitalization program for the Yaguas. Funding provided by IU pre-dissertation grant. Project has resulted in numerous conference presentations in the U.S. and abroad, with various publications in print and accepted.
San Luis Potosí, México: May-July 2010
Data collection with native speakers of the region and learners of Spanish in the host community. Project has resulted in one conference presentation and two publications.