LSA 2009

Lev Michael is Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley. With an areal focus on Peruvian Amazonia, he has carried out fieldwork on Nanti (Arawak) and Iquito (Zaparoan), and is currently working with a corpus of texts produced by a speaker of Omagua (Tupí-Guaraní-based creole/mixed language). His interests include oral poetry and the prosodic systems that underpin them; the social functions of indexical grammatical categories, especially evidentiality; Amazonian historical and contact linguistics; and the social and political dimensions of language endangerment. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008.