ABOUT ME
CIESAS DF, Mexico - 2018
My teaching & research gravitate towards work with interactive multidisciplinary teams engaged in community-based linguistic projects in Mexico and the United States. I am faculty at the Department of Linguistics & the School of Global Policy and Strategy, International Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego. I teach a variety of linguistics courses about linguistics and language policy and also work at the documentation and description of the less-described languages of Mexico and Mesoamerica in their social & cultural context.
I take a theoretically informed approach to language description while considering broader research agendas that include community efforts for language conservation & revitalization. I am interested in tone, morphology, lexicography, digital archiving, language documentation & conservation, language policy, language & society, literacy, and teaching.
BROADER RESEARCH AGENDAS
I have been conducting research as part of the Chatino Language Documentation Project (CLDP) since 2007 (Cruz and Woodbury, 2014). This work joins community and academic efforts to conduct language documentation and description on as many varieties of Chatino as possible while considering broader research agendas that include community efforts for language conservation & revitalization, literacy, and writing.
A core part of my research activities is to work with speakers of indigenous languages in the development and techniques of documentary and descriptive linguistics. From 2012-2019 I collaborated with linguists from the United States, Mexico & Brazil who are dedicated to the training of native speakers and speaker linguists in the identification of and description of tone, the writing of pedagogical grammars, and the writing and production of texts of all kinds.
Working with languages from the Otomanguean linguistic family and other Mesoamerican languages, these annual workshops have taken place in conjunction with the University of Massachusetts, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California, Santa Barbara & San Diego, CIESAS D.F. and Oaxaca, UNAM, the Centro San Pablo de la Biblioteca San Juan de Córdova in Oaxaca, Mexico and INALI.
I am also interested in the theorization of digital corpora and the curation of archival materials for linguistic resources and linguistic data. I worked at the Archive for the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) at the University of Texas at Austin from 2010-2015. My work there contributed to the preparation and curation of several collections, most notably that of Terrence Kaufman's Latin American Languages Collection released in 2018.