April 17: Arienne Dwyer (University of Kansas) “Using Languages as Historical Sources”

Please join us on Wednesday April 17, 2013 for a special presentation by Arienne M. Dwyer, Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities at CUNY Graduate Center and Professor of Linguistic Anthropology and Co-Director, Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Kansas. Details are below – we look forward to seeing you there!

Arienne Dwyer

“Using Languages as Historical Sources”

Wednesday April 17, 2013, 6:30pm-8:30pm

CUNY Graduate Center, Room 3212

Please register here http://using_languages.eventbrite.com

The event is free and open to the public; registration is not mandatory.

Clues to the history of diaspora communities and contacts with other peoples and ecosystems are embedded like fossils in the bedrock of language. Historians rarely if ever make use of this kind of historical information, while historical linguists only use it to investigate language, not culture. This talk will use ethnohistorical, linguistic and digital humanities techniques to illustrate how spoken narratives and even conversations can help us understand cultural historical patterns.

About Arienne Dwyer:

Professor Dwyer is Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities at CUNY Graduate Center and Professor of Linguistic Anthropology and Co-Director, Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Kansas. She has conducted more than two decades of in situ collaborative research with communities in Inner and Central Asia and China, and publishes extensively on ethnolinguistic contact and change, language endangerment, and language ideology. Her current research is in corpus linguistics, query interfaces, and language contact. She teaches documentary linguistics, language technologies, and digital humanities.

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