Faculty
 John H. McDowell Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology more |
John McDowell, graduate of Swarthmore College and the University of Texas, acquired a lasting affection for the Andes when studying Cochabamba Quechua with Bernardo Vallejo in Austin back in the 1970s. This involvement with the language was extended through tours of ethnographic research at the other end of Quechuan geography, among the Ingas of Colombia's Sibundoy Valley, with support from a Fulbright Fellowship and other sources. In Colombia he made contact and common cause with Professor Francisco Tandioy, Inga teacher and cultural activist, and initiated a research collaboration that has endured for more than a quarter of a century now. Products of these labors include "Sayings of the Ancestors: The Spiritual Life of the Sibundoy Indians" (1989) and "So Wise Were Our Elders: Mythic Narratives of the Kamsá" (1994), both published by the University Press of Kentucky, as well as several articles in social science journals. Current research is with the Quichua Runa around Otavalo, Ecuador, with an emphasis on the folklorization of indigenous tradition. |
Director of MLCP |
Daniel F. Suslak is trained as a linguistic anthropologist, and received a joint Ph.D. in Linguistics and Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2005. Since 1991 he has been conducting fieldwork in Southern Mexico on several different Mixe-Zoquean languages and the communities in which they continue to be spoken. His research focuses on grammatical change and changing patterns of language use and how they both form part of larger social changes. He has been studying how language serves as a medium through which people talk about the impact of economic development and globalization on their lives and how it becomes valued as a symbolic resource that social actors struggle to control and pass on to future generations. A professor in the Anthropology Department, he teaches courses on linguistic anthropology, youth and adolescence, mesoamerican languages and cultures. Professor Suslak is also affiliated with the Project for the Documentation of the Languages of Mesoamerica: http://www.albany.edu/anthro/maldp/ |
 Serafín M. Coronel-Molina Assistant Professor of Language Education |
Serafín M. Coronel-Molina is an educational linguist and a sociolinguist. He is a native speaker of Huanca Quechua, the variety of Quechua spoken in the central highlands of Peru. He also speaks Ayacucho and Cuzco Quechua, and Spanish with native fluency. Dr. Coronel-Molina received his B.A. in Translation (English, French and Cuzco Quechua) from the Ricardo Palma University in Peru; he obtained his M.A. in Hispanic Linguistics from the Ohio State University, and his Ph. D. in Educational Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. He has published articles in Quechua, English and Spanish, and presented papers internationally. In addition, he has considerable experience in second and foreign language education, having been a Spanish and Quechua lecturer at various universities in Peru and the United States. Before joining Indiana University in 2007, he was an instructor at Princeton University. Professor Coronel-Molina's research interests include revitalization of indigenous languages (Quechua and Aymara), politics of language, language attitudes and ideologies, minority languages and technology, language maintenance and shift, language contact phenomena, second and foreign language acquisition and learning, issues of language, culture and identity in the Andes and beyond. His research is of an interdisciplinary nature, drawing on fields as diverse as macro- and micro-sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, education, ethnography of communication, language policy and planning, pragmatics, politics and history. |
 Michael Gasser Associate Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science more |
Michael Gasser is a computational linguist and cognitive scientist. After 10 years of language teaching, he received his PhD in Applied Linguistics from UCLA and came to Indiana University, where for the next 15 years he developed computational models of human language acquisition. Five years ago, he became convinced that research in computational linguistics could benefit the "disadvantaged" languages of the Global South, and his work now focuses on building practical systems that process such languages and can be applied to tasks such as translation, language teaching, information retrieval, and language revitalization. Within Latin America, he concentrates on several indigenous languages, and he has written programs that analyze and generate words in Quechua, Guarani, and K'iche'. He is in the early stages of a project in Paraguay involving collaboration between machine translation software and sixth graders in the translation of science-related documents from Spanish into Guarani. He is also active in the social forum movement, having co-organized workshops on scholar activism and linguistic rights at social forums in Brazil, Guatemala, and the United States. |
 Jeffrey Gould Rudy Professor of History |
Jeffrey L. Gould is the James H. Rudy Professor of History at Indiana University. From 1995-2008, he was Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. His most recent book is To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920-32 (with Aldo Lauria), Duke University Press, 2008. Previously he published To Lead as Equals: Rural Protest and Political Consciousness in Chinandega, Nicaragua, 1912-1979 UNC Press, 1990; El Mito de Nicaragua Mestiza y la Resistencia Indígena Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 1997; and To Die in This Way: Nicaraguan Indian Communities and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880-1965 Duke University Press, 1998. He is co-author of The Twentieth Century: A Retrospective (Westview 2002) He is also co editor of Memorias de Mestizaje: la política cultural en América Central desde 1900. The latter book derived from an NEH collaborative project that he co directed with Charles Hale and Darío Euraque. Gould co-directed and co-produced "Scars of Memory: El Salvador, 1932." (Icarus, 2003), a 53-minute documentary film (Award of Merit, LASA). In 2002, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship. |
 Shane Greene Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Studies more |
Shane Greene finished his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2004. He does work on indigenous and afro-descendent rights, social justice movements, environmental politics, and state multiculturalism in Latin America and has published in various venues ranging from major anthropological journals to more activist and journalistic formats. He has carried out extended ethnographic research in Peru, primarily in Andean Amazonia as well as more recently in urban Lima. |
 Hilary Kahn Associate Director, Center for the Study of Global Change Director, PhD Minor in Global Studies Adjunct Asst. Professor of Anthropology |
Hilary E. Kahn, a cultural anthropologist and Associate Director for the Indiana University Center for the Study of Global Change, has been conducting research and establishing educational programs in Latin America and the Caribbean since 1990. Her areas of interest and expertise include visual anthropology, indigenous image-making, transnational identity formation, intimate spaces of globalization, international education, and intercultural teaching and learning. She has taught numerous courses on topics such as anthropological theory, ethnographic methods, visual anthropology, intercultural communication, the anthropology of religion, and the cultures of Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. By using videoconferencing technology to link with classrooms overseas, she has taught students in Macedonia, Indonesia, and Russia. She currently directs an international service learning program in a small fishing village in Bluefields, Jamaica. Her book Seeing and Being Seen: The Q'eqchi' Maya of Guatemala and Beyond (University of Texas Press, 2006) explores how politics of sight define identities and perceptions among the Q'eqchi' Maya of Livingston, Guatemala as well as have implications in the broader ethnographic endeavor. |
 Stacie King Assistant Professor of Anthropology |
Stacie King is an archaeologist in the Anthropology Department at Indiana University. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California Berkeley in 2003, after completing a dissertation on everyday social and economic activities in an Early Postclassic (A.D. 975-1220) Mexico village in southern Oaxaca, Mexico. Deeply interested in the long-term histories of various peoples in ancient Oaxaca, Stacie's work explores the relationship between food sharing and household membership, mortuary practices and burial beneath house floors, networks of trade and communication, the production of cotton cloth, multi-ethnic landscapes, soundscapes and the senses, and reuse and social memory. Her current project is focused on the Chatino, Mixe, and Zapotec region of Nejapa in southeastern Oaxaca. For at least 3,500 years, Nejapa has been a primary stopover on the trade route connecting highland Oaxaca to the Isthmus. Stacie is developing a long-term archaeological project with community members in Nejapa and Tavela that examines how the economies, politics, and social identities of people living along trade routes were (or were not) intertwined with those in urban areas, and explores the ways that residents negotiated their place in this shifting, multi-ethnic, sometimes violent, landscape. She is also developing educational materials and recording interviews with elder residents about Nejapa history and the power and meaning of archaeology to people today. |
 Javier F. León Assistant Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology |
Javier F. León is an ethnomusicologist originally from Lima, Peru. He received B.A. in astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley and M.M. and Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Texas at Austin. Professor León taught at the Newcomb Department of Music and The Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University and joined Indiana University in 2007. His research has focused on contemporary Afroperuvian music making, criollo popular music and nationalism in the early and mid-twentieth century Lima, and the politics of academic research. Since 1995 he has worked with prominent Peruvian artists such as Manuel Acosta Ojeda, Gabriel Alegría, Roberto Arguedas, Oscar Avilés, Eva Ayllón, Susana Baca, Félix Casaverde, Novalima, Peru Negro, Teatro del Milenio, and Abelardo Vásquez. He is currently conducting research on how neoliberal socioeconomic reforms are affecting Afroperuvian musical production and its ability to remain a symbol of Black identity. |
 Anya Peterson Royce Chancellor's Professor of Anthropology and Comparative Literature |
Anya Peterson Royce received a BA with Distinction from Stanford (1968) in Anthropology and Honors in Humanities, a MA (1971) and a Ph.D. (1974) in Anthropology from the University of California Berkeley. She joined the faculty of Indiana University in 1973. Royce's research has centered on three areas: the anthropology of dance and performing arts, cultural and ethnic identity, and the ethnography of Mexico, with particular focus on the Isthmus Zapotec. The overarching theme of her work with the Zapotec has been on persistence and change. Her first book, Prestigio y afiliación en una comunidad urbana: Juchitán, Oaxaca, was published in 1975. Her subsequent publications, in both Spanish and English, examine such themes as household incomes, music, dance, and fiesta as means of community building, the role of Zapotec intellectuals and artists, embodied aesthetics, healing and illness, and Isthmus Zapotec poetry. Her latest book, Becoming an Ancestor: The Isthmus Zapotec Way of Death (SUNY Press, forthcoming) examines the domain of death as a point of entry into fundamental values and practices that have sustained the Isthmus Zapotec throughout a long history marked by self-determination. She is completing a documentary film, The Art of Being Zapotec, on Zapotec embodiment of an aesthetic that encompasses both ordinary activities and the performing, visual, and literary arts. Homenaje a Hebert Rasgado, completed in 2008, is a 22 minute film about one musician and composer. She has been working with local poets translating their work from Zapotec into English. Royce's other books on dance, performing arts, and ethnic identity have been informed by her work with the Isthmus Zapotec. Her research has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Delmas Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council. |
 Micol Seigel Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and American Studies more |
Micol Seigel (Ph. D. NYU American Studies) is Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and American Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her work on cultural politics, transnational method, and race in the Americas, particularly the U.S. and Brazil, can be found in the Hispanic American Historical Review, the Radical History Review, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, the Revista Brasileira de História, the Black Music Research Journal and in her forthcoming book, Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States, to be published by Duke University Press in February 2009. Micol's current research tracks connections among prison systems in the Americas. She can be reached at mseigel@indiana.edu. See more. |
 Stephen Selka Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and American Studies |
Stephen Selka is a sociocultural anthropologist interested in the intersection of religion, race and politics in Brazil and the Americas. My primary research focuses on the intersection of religion and racial mobilization in Bahia, Brazil, where I have been conducing ethnographic fieldwork since 1999. My recently published book, Religion and the Politics of Ethnic Identity in Brazil, explores the variety of ways that people of descent involved with different religious groups construct their identities as Afro-Brazilians and participate in struggles against racism. |
Language Instructors
|
David Tezil currently teaches Haitian Creole courses at Indiana University. Born in Port-au-Prince Haiti, David spent the last five years working with the Haitian community living in South Florida where he had lived for seven years. He had also contributed to the implementation of bilingual and multicultural learning materials for Haitian speaking students and adult literacy programs. David was also an interpreter and language facilitator for the Department of Multicultural of Palm Beach School District in Florida, and he is currently pursuing a doctorate degree in linguistics at Indiana University. |
 Quetzil Castañeda Yucatec Maya Instructor |
Dr. Quetzil Castañeda is a visiting professor in CLACS (fall 2006–present) and Research
Associate in the Department of Anthropology. He previously taught in the Latino Studies
Program (spring 2006) and is currently teaching the Yucatec Maya language courses.
Castañeda has also taught at Princeton, University of Hawai'i, University of Houston, and
the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán in Mexico. He is founding director of OSEA – the
Open School of Ethnography and Anthropology, which is an independent, non-degree school
that offers study abroad, writing workshops, research methods, and consulting services
|
 Francisco Tandioy Jansasoy Inga Instructor |
Francisco Tandioy Jansasoy teaches Inga at Indiana University. Francisco has come to IU from the Sibundoy Valley in highland Putumayo, Colombia. A native speaker of Inga and an Inga community activist, Francisco co-founded Musu Runakuna, a political action group that works closely with Inga elders to promote Inga language, cultural expression, and land rights. Having received a Masters degree in Linguistics as well as Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Indiana University, Francisco is now enrolled as a PhD student in the department of Folklore. |
Graduate Assistant
Paulina Guerrero Graduate Assistant 2011-2012 |
Paulina is a 1st year student in the PhD Folklore program at IU. Her research interests are in folk narratives, folk belief, cultural sustainability issues in Latin America, and women's folklore. She completed her Master's in Folklore from George Mason University in 2010. She has been a presenter at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival for the Mexico and the Colombia program along with working at Folkways Records and previous years in the Wales, Texas, and Nuestras Musicas sections. She has conducted fieldwork in Puerto Rico about street festivals and plenero musicians that culminated in a short documentary film, and is interested in further incorporating film as ethnographic media in her future work. |
Graduate Students
 Katherine Forgacs |
Katherine came to Bloomington in 2003 as a Master's student in IU's Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. Her research interests lie in the material culture and human landscapes of the US and Eastern Caribbean. She learned Haitian Creole at IU and on a Summer FLAS at FIU, subsequently volunteering as a Haitian Creole translator at the 2004 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. She later studied St Lucian Creole at IU with Professor Albert Valdman. For the ML&CP Katherine initiated the ongoing inventory of the IU Creole Institute's unique collection of Creole-language documents from around the world. Her other areas of interest include the architecture, music, and history of the Atlantic Americas. She conducted archaeological and architectural research in St Kitts, Nevis, and St Lucia in 2001, 2002, and 2004, and hopes to return to St Lucia in 2008. |  Michael Grove |
Michael Grove was educated as a computer scientist and is interested in the possibilities and dangers of technology. He is currently a Ph.D. student in Latin American History, and studies the cultural history of technology. He hopes that digital technologies will enable new methods of language preservation and cross-cultural understanding. To this end, he programmed the Pipil Language and Culture CD, worked with Project CAMVA's video preservation effort, and is active in the nascent ML&CP web projects. |  Mintzi Auanda Martinez-Rivera |
Mintzi was born in Chicago, raised in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, México and educated in San Juan Puerto Rico. She received her B.A. in European History from the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras in 2004. That same year she began an M.A. in Folklore in Indiana University-Bloomington. While completing the last requirements for the M.A. Mintzi is already enrolled in the Ph.D. track in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and in the Department of Anthropology. She aims to graduate in 2011 with a double concentration in Folklore and Anthropology. |  Selina Morales Graduate Assistant 2006-07 more |
Selina entered the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology as a Masters student in 2006. Her research has focused on cooking and traditional healing in Latin America, she has conducted fieldwork in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Bahia, Brazil and Chiapas and Yucatán Mexico. Currently she is curating a museum exhibit at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures, which focuses on Puerto Rican botánicas and storytelling. |  J. Eduardo Wolf |
Eduardo is currently a fourth year graduate student in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. He focuses on the music of Latin America, specifically Chile. His Master's work focuses on the history and performative aspects of the Chilean tonada. For his doctorate, he hopes to concentrate on the multiple music cultures of Arica and surrounding areas. This past year he was awarded a FLAS to study Quechua. |
