William F. Hanks

LSA 109: Deixis and indexicality

Bill Hanks received the Joint Ph.D. in Linguistics and Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1983, and joined the faculty of both departments from Assistant Professor through Full Professor (1983-1996). He subsequently taught in Anthropology at Northwestern (1996-2000) and is currently the Berkeley Distinguished Professor in Linguistic Anthropology at Berkeley. From 2001-2006 he served as Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Berkeley. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Paris X, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the Casa de America in Madrid, and the University of Copenhagen. In 1996-1997 he was a Guggenheim Fellow and in 2008-2009 (Dec-Jan) he was an invited fellow at the Institut des Études Avancées in Paris. His research draws on in-depth study and fieldwork in Yucatec Maya. It focuses on deixis and conversational context, the formation of colonial Yucatec Maya (sixteenth-nineteenth century), and modern ritual language and practice. His books include Referential Practice, Language and Lived Space Among the Maya (Chicago, 1990), Language and Communicative Practice (Westview, 1995) and Converting Words, Maya in the Age of the Cross (California, 2009).

External website: http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/anth/hanks.html