Spring 2014 Grant Recipient
Faculty
Lise Dobrin (Anthropology) Jacob Sonin, a native speaker elder from an Arapesh village in Papua New Guinea, came to UVa for a ten-week residency during which he collaborated with Dobrin and her students in three areas: 1) Sonin served as the linguistic consultant for the course Dobrin taught, ANTH 5401 Linguistic Field Methods. This gave students the chance to learn directly from a native speaker about Arapesh, one of the world's many small endangered languages. 2) Sonin made several presentations to the UVa and Charlottesville community. He spoke in classes about his experiences of development, and he presented on inter-community relations in the Arapesh region at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection. 3) Sonin provided translations for the Arapesh Grammar and Digital Language Archive, an archive of materials on Arapesh language and culture that Dobrin is curating with support from UVa's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.