The Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang) is an international institute which creates multi-dimensional networks and provides quality training for language workers, including activists, teachers, linguists, and students from all types of communities. CoLang workshops provide hands-on skills in language reclamation, documentation, and related fields as practiced in collaborative, community-based contexts. I currently serve on the CoLang Advisory Circle. Previously, I served as the program coordinator for CoLang 2024 (co-hosted by Arizona State University and the O’odham-Piipaash Language Program of the Salt River Pima Maricopa Indian Community) and CoLang 2020 (co-hosted by the University of Montana and Chief Dull Knife College). 

This is a joint CNRS-UA project focused on village and emerging sign languages in Mesoamerica. There are a large number of small sign languages throughout Mayan-speaking region of Mesoamerica due to high rates of congenital deafness in various Maya communities (Le Guen 2019). Fox Tree 2009 documents how some of these sign languages, for example Meemul Tzij, used in the K'iche' Maya speaking area, incorporates pan-Maya gestures of arguably ancient origin (due to the fact that they are seen in Classic Maya inscriptions). The goal of this project is to document the pluractional systems of both Mayan sign languages, as well as co-speech gesture with pluractionals in spoken Mayan languages.

PIs: Robert Henderson (UA), Jeremy Kuhn (CNRS) & Carlo Geraci (CNRS)

Indigenous Languages of the Americas and their Structures (ILAS) is a project dedicated to supporting community-centered language revitalization, reclamation and maintenance. The primary goal of the ILAS project is to produce a series open-access textbooks for language workers, with a focus on Indigenous languages of the Americas. The aim of these books is to enable community language workers to use linguistic concepts and tools in their work, and to make previously published work on Indigenous languages more accessible.

The first volume of ILAS, Sounds, is forthcoming via Language Science Press.

My dissertation focuses on the morphosyntax of nominal inflection across the Algonquian language family. Algonquian languages are notable for their abundant syncretisms, where suffixes realize distinct features without corresponding distinctions in form. While these languages share a core set of inflectional features (animacy, number, and obviation), language-specific syncretisms yield varying paradigm shapes across the family. In this project, I investigate the underlying organization of nominal features, how it captures both pattern and variation across the family, and how new speakers might learn to navigate these and other inflectional systems.