Recovery of the Language
Christian Ruvalcaba
Research interests: Linguistics and grammar, linguistic landscapes, heritage languages, participatory action research and pedagogy, place-meaning research, language teaching, place-based learning.
Dr. Ruvalcaba received a Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching from the University of Arizona in 2018 and a BA in Linguistics in 2008. He is from Cananea, Sonora, and Sierra Vista, Arizona. His teaching and research focus on the role of language in place-meaning and place-making for communities of color. He also researches how languages express location/place and how the grammar of these expressions overlap with other notions, such as possession and experience. He is the co-founder of the Language Capital Project, an ongoing project that investigates multilingual spaces in Tucson, Arizona. He is also a member of the Language Society of America’s Committee on Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics. Currently, he is a research coordinator for the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry.
Michael Everdell
Research interests: linguistics, lexical semantics, Uto-Aztecan languages, irregularity, historical linguistics.
Michael is in the process of earning his Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin working with John Beavers and earned his BA in Anthropology at Oberlin College in 2013. He is from Boston, MA. His dissertation is on the properties of argument realization and agreement in O’dam (Southeastern Tepehuan), spoken in Durango, Mexico. He has also worked on reconstructing verbal suppletion in the Uto-Aztecan family and statistical methods for determining the internal organization of the Uto-Aztecan family.
Other Academics Supporting the Opateria
Joe Barron
Research Interests: Ecology, Evolution, Herpetology, Endangered Species Conservation, and Systematics.
Joe is in the process of obtaining his masters of Fisheries and Wildlife Science from Virginia Tech. Born into a military family, he claims Washington, DC as his hometown and received a BS of Biology from Cornell University. Joe has spent several years working on projects that focus on small isolated wetlands and the unique communities that inhabit them. His current research focuses on the conservation of bog turtles, a cryptic and endangered species found in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Using a mixture of field surveys and GIS software, he looks at factors that influence where they are found on the landscape to identify critical habitat and management priorities for the state. Joe values connecting communities to their natural resources, and has been in involved with many outreach programs such as the Alleghany Nature Pilgrimage, Cornell Naturalist Practicum and the Cornell Herpetological Society.