Publishing: Telling Animals
My peer-reviewed monograph, published here: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793619730/Telling-Animals-Animacies-in-Dene-Narratives.
Teaching: Discourse Analysis in Dene Orature, University of Victoria, 2018
In January 2018, I taught a course in my area of specialization, Dene/Athabaskan oral narratives, using approaches from Discourse Analysis (DA). It is cross-listed between the departments of Linguistics and English at UVic.
With six students in the class as well as my highly committed supervisor, Leslie Saxon, we worked through the narrative and discourse structures of a variety of Dene stories ranging from Alaska to northern Alberta to the Southwest.
We drew primarily on the DA subfield of functional grammar to get into detailed engagement with the stories in the Dene source languages as well as in the target translation language, English.
By doing so, we also thought about some of the lessons that these important stories have to teach.
Teaching: Applied and embodied approaches to ancient world literature, 2024
Story-making in ancient Mesopotamia. Using air-dry clay and chopsticks, my students will create cuneiform tablets with their choice of content—emojis, cosmograms, original compositions, or replicas of tablets available to view at the electronic Babylonian Library (eBL) (https://www.ebl.lmu.de/). In preparation, I am working on a translational knowledge of Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform, using the eBL as well as: Snell’s New Workbook of Cuneiform Signs (2022), Parpola’s The standard Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh: Cuneiform text, transliteration, glossary, indices and sign list (1997), and Finkel and Taylor’s Cuneiform (2015).
Archiving: Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University, 2017
For Michaelmas Term 2017, I took up a postdoctoral visiting research fellowship at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University.
I pursued two goals at Oxford: to connect and work with multidisciplinary Americanists from an international and intercultural vantage point, and to dig into the Oxford University's archives to uncover their Indigenous-language and -culture related materials.
My findings at the Weston library were fascinating thanks to the support of UOxford's archival staff! And thanks to the collegial and generous relationships embraced by the RAI's graduate students, fellows, and leadership I was able to wrap up my stay with a 1.5 hour seminar on Indigenous archival materials, i.e, the burning question of archival access.
Workshopping: Harvard University’s Institute of World Literature, Cyprus, 2024
Translation studies seminar, with a special focus on Greek literary studies; plus a colloquium on post-colonialism and world literature!
Conferencing: ICLDC 2016, University of Hawaii at Manoa
At this incredibly well-organized and highly specialized conference for language-documentation and activists, I presented my research on the poetics and ethics of a Wolverine story told in the late 1980s in northern Alberta by a quiet master storyteller, Elisse Ahnassay.
My way into the work is to compare the AV recording with the textualized version, looking at how soundscape theory allows us to listen deeply.
Researching: Délįnę NT, 2019
For the second summer in a row, our research group for the project Délı̨nę Gonáoweré Gogodí: Conversing with Community, Land and Creator visited Délįnę in the Northwest Territories to work with local and visiting scholars on links between land, language, story, and spirituality. While there, we were taken out fishing as guests, shown how to make an offering to the lake, invited to meet with people involved in multiple projects in the region, and given the time to plan sustainable and accessible resources for story and language maintenance and revitalization.
Other fun stuff
I have four cats and a dog, all rescues.
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I’ve been teaching myself a little Greek and Welsh for teaching, translating, and travel.
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I love lightweight backpacking, backcountry camping, and outdoors climbing in the Rockies, Olympics, Cascades, Albion Range, and Sierra Nevada.
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I have my advanced, 90-hour wilderness first aid certificate to help support these endeavors.