Directors
Daniel Kaufman
Daniel Kaufman, linguist, focused on languages of the Austronesian family for the last decade and a half, during which he published mostly on the phonology, morphology and syntax of Tagalog, the national language of the Philippines, in addition to carrying out fieldwork on various other languages of the Philippines and Indonesia. More recently, he has turned his attention closer to home to focus on several languages of the Nilo-Saharan and Arawakan families spoken by immigrant communities in his native New York City. He is currently an adjunct professor in the CUNY Graduate Center where he has striven to incorporate a fieldwork component into courses on morphology, syntax and phonology. In 2008, he founded the Urban Fieldstation for Linguistic Research with the purpose of initiating long-term language projects in cooperation with immigrant communities in NYC and local linguistics students. This summer (2010), he plans to continue gathering data on several under-described and endangered languages of Indonesia.
Juliette Blevins
Juliette Blevins, linguist, has been a Senior Scientist in the Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, for the past five years, following professorships at UT Austin, the University of Western Australia, and UC Berkeley. Her contributions to linguistics include over one hundred publications, and span a range of sub-disciplines, from novel syntheses of phonetics, phonology, typology, and sound change, to historical reconstruction and endangered language documentation and revitalization. Areal interests include Australian Aboriginal languages, American Indian languages, Austronesian languages, and the languages of the Andaman Islands. From Fall 2010 she will be Professor in the Linguistics Program at CUNY Graduate Center, heading the Endangered Language Initiative.
Personal webpage: http://email.eva.mpg.de/~blevins/
Bob Holman
Bob Holman, founder and proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club, is a poet most often connected with spoken word, performance, hiphop and slam. He has published nine books of poetry and released two CDs. He teaches at NYU and Columbia, including “Poets Census,” where students locate poets from non-English speaking communities, and “Translating Endangered Languages.” He is currently working on two Endangered Language Projects: the Endangered Cento, under the auspices of CityLore, a 100-line poem with each line from a different endangered tongue; and “On the Road with Bob Holman,” a series of half-hour documentaries for LinkTV with Holman as host. Two shows on West Africa and one on Israel and Palestine will premiere Fall 2010; he is shooting the revival of Welsh in Wales this summer.
Personal webpage: http://www.bobholman.com/
Bowery poetry club: http://www.bowerypoetry.com/
