The Department of Linguistics gratefully acknowledges the generosity of our newest affiliate faculty member, Arienne Dwyer, formerly Prof. of Linguistic Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, University of Kansas. Thanks to Prof. Dwyer’s fund, the department will be able to make an annual award of about $450/year to support indigenous language documentation by a departmental member.
No stranger to University of Washington, Prof. Dwyer received an MA (1990) and PhD (1996) from the Department of Asian Languages and Literature here. She is one of the leading scholars of language contact and Central Asian languages and linguistics, with impressive credentials in Turkic, Sinitic and Mongolic language families. Among her accomplishments at the University of Kansas was the award of a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014, “for individuals who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts”. An experienced fieldworker, Prof. Dwyer has worked with speakers of various languages. She has written, taught and presented about field methods at locations such as Co-Lang summer schools (2008-2016), and she directed Co-Lang at the University of Kansas in 2012. She creates digital editions of otherwise inaccessible texts and has developed a set of best practices for archiving, corpora and cyberinfrastructure.
On May 20, she made a presentation in Field Reports on "Atypical research: overcoming sparse data and difficult conditions". Contact Sharon Hargus if you are interested in attending Dwyer's presentation