Bridget Chase
Digital Project Consultant
Bridget Chase is currently a Master’s student at the Sauder School of Business, with a BA in Linguistics from the University of British Columbia. She has worked for the last four years within the field of language-focused web technology, focusing on digital visualizations of language online. This has included the creation of Indigenous language learning tools, and involvement in a partnership with the Heiltsuk Cultural Education Centre for the development and mobilization of language materials online. Bridget has also previously worked with Sichuan University and the Cambridge Rivers Project to develop a digitally-integrated Multimedia Fieldwork Management System for anthropologists in China.
Sienna R. Craig
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
Dartmouth College
Sienna R. Craig is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College (USA). She received her BA from Brown University (Religious Studies, 1995) and her PhD from Cornell University (Anthropology, 2006). She is the author of Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine (UC Press, 2012), Horses Like Lightning: A Story of Passage through the Himalaya (Wisdom Publications, 2008), and the co-editor of Medicine Between Science and Religion: Explorations on Tibetan Grounds (Berghahn Books, 2010), Studies of Medical Pluralism in Tibetan History and Society (IITBS, 2010), and a Special Issue of Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity 5(2) on Medicinal Plant Cultivation, Conservation and Commoditization in the Himalaya and Tibet. Her scholarship has appeared in Current Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Anthropology and Humanism, Journal of the American Medical Association, Hastings Review, and Social Science and Medicine, among other peer reviewed journals. Her work has been supported by grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Fulbright Commission, and the Social Science Research Council. She has worked on collaborative, applied global health projects funded by the Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Craig enjoys writing across genres, from literary ethnography and interdisciplinary social science work to creative nonfiction, fiction, children’s literature, and poetry. From 2012-2017 she was the co-editor of HIMALAYA, Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies. Since 2009, she has served as a member of the Executive Council of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine (IASTAM) Council. Craig is also a co-founder of DROKPA, a nonprofit organization that partners with Himalayan communities to support projects in education, community health, and social entrepreneurship.
Maya Daurio
Graduate Student Coordinator
Maya Daurio is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include language endangerment and maintenance, traditional ecological knowledge, social-ecological resilience, indigeneity, and mountain geographies. She previously worked in in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and is interested in anthropological, ecological, and humanitarian applications of GIS.
Nawang Tsering Gurung
Independent Researcher and Consultant
Nawang Tsering Gurung is an independent researcher, consultant, translator, speaker and tour specialist originally from the Himlayan region of Mustang in Nepal and now based in New York City. He is the coordinator of the oral history project Voices of the Himalayas: Language, Culture, and Belonging in Immigrant New York which has been documenting the languages, cultures, social histories, folklore and community life of Himalayan New Yorker, together with the Endangered Language Alliance and scholars. He is also founder and director of Yulha Fund, a non-profit dedicated to ensuring sustainable livelihoods and improving access to education and healthcare in the himalayan communities of Nepal. He is currently the advisory council of Rubin Museum. He is the co-author on several presentations and publications based on his work and co-author one of the book Dogyab: Ritual Tibetain de Conjuration du Mal (in French), a study of Bon religion in Nepal. If you’d like to collaborate, you can reach him at: www.nawanggurung.com
Daniel Kaufman
Founder & Co-Director, Endangered Language Alliance
Daniel Kaufman is a linguist who has focused on the languages of the Austronesian family for the last two decades. 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. In 2010, this became formalized as ELA and has continued to grow since. He received his PhD from Cornell in 2010 and became Assistant Professor at Queens College, where he is heading the new Language Documentation Lab. As of 2018, Daniel co-edits Oceanic Linguistics, a journal devoted to the study of the indigenous languages of the Oceanic region and Island Southeast Asia.
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Jason Lampel
Jason Lampel is a Colorado-based web developer who specializes in interactive maps. He owns and operates A Better Map and has a background in Geographic Information Systems. Jason’s primary mapping interests include land conservation, natural resources, wildlife, and environmental protection.
Matt Malone
Matt Malone is a linguist based in NYC. While studying at Columbia University, he assisted ELA with Seke documentation, and conducted individual fieldwork on Bapuku in Kribi, Cameroon. He recently completed his M.Phil. at Cambridge, where he studied computational linguistics and created “Swahili SimLex-999,” a resource to evaluate the quality of Swahili language models. Born and raised in NYC, he is very excited to contribute to this project and celebrate the linguistic diversity of his hometown.
Ross Perlin
Co-Applicant Co-Director, Endangered Language Alliance
Ross Perlin is a writer and linguist. His linguistic work has focused on the endangered languages of China and the Himalayas (supported by the Himalayan Languages Project and the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme) and more recently on Jewish languages in New York. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Guardian (UK), and The Washington Post, and his first book was Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy. Ross has degrees from Stanford, Cambridge, the Language Documentation program at SOAS, and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Bern.
Mark Turin
Principal ApplicantPeter Wall Scholar
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology University of British Columbia
Mark Turin is an anthropologist, linguist and occasional radio presenter. His research and writing focus on language endangerment, documentation and revitalization; language policies and politics; orality, archives, digital tools and technology, and Indigenous methodologies and decolonial practice broadly conceived. For over twenty years, Dr. Turin’s regional focus has been the Himalayan region (particularly Nepal, northern India and Bhutan), and more recently, the Pacific Northwest. Dr. Turin has had the privilege of working in collaborative partnership with members of the Thangmi-speaking community of eastern Nepal and Darjeeling district in India since 1996, and since 2014 with members of the Heiltsuk First Nation through a Language Mobilization Partnership in which UBC is a founding member. From 2014-2018, Dr. Turin served as Chair of the First Nations and Endangered Languages Program and from 2016-2018, as Acting Co-Director of the University’s new Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. He continues to hold an appointment as Visiting Associate Professor at the Yale School Forestry & Environmental Studies where he serves as co-investigator on a multiyear NASA-funded research project on urbanization and vulnerability in the Himalayan region. As a firm advocate of collaborative research, Dr. Turin is committed to widening public engagement with anthropology and linguistics.