How long have you taught at U.Va. and how did you end up here?
It'll be seven years in January. I was actually working in the Netherlands -- I had a post-doc there. And this job was advertised in the year that I was looking for a job because my contract [in the Netherlands] was coming to an end. The usual academic way: apply on paper, make a visit. I remember it was early February, and I came and they put me up in what is now the Colonnade Club on the Lawn. It's sort of Jeffersonian beds, and so on. It was very unlike the kinds of interviews you might have on other campuses, where you end up in the Hilton or something like that. I also remember it snowed that weekend. So when I arrived it was an ordinary, plain winter, but then all the snow came down. It was very beautiful.
What is your educational background?
I have a Ph.D. in anthropology, in linguistic anthropology. I got the Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. I had this post-doc after the Ph.D., which is sort of part of the education, I guess. That was at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. But before I started my Ph.D., I had been to university in Toronto, which is where I grew up -- I'm a Canadian. And I have a B.A. and an M.A. from different universities in Toronto. My M.A. is in anthropology, but my B.A. was in linguistics.
You just mentioned that you grew up in Canada, but in your sociolinguistics course you also talk about your "sociolinguistic autobiography." Would you briefly tell me about it?
Yeah, I have a pretty international autobiography. I was born in Indonesia. I was born on the island of Java, in a town called Jogjakarta, and people there speak Javanese, which is the local language. And then there's a national language, Indonesian, which people speak in order to communicate with speakers from other islands, or from other towns and villages. So both of those languages were current around the town and I'm told I was beginning to speak those languages.
My parents were new to Indonesia as well -- we went there because my dad got a job for those few years. So it's not that they were exposing me to those languages, but that we were in that atmosphere. We left when I was still very little; I was two. Since then I haven't had a chance to continue learning those languages and I don't have much of a recollection.
When we left Indonesia, we went to Cape Town, South Africa. That was where my father himself had grown up after leaving Germany as a child when the Second World War broke out. My father was a German-speaking Jew. My mother is British and not Jewish. My father had grown up speaking South African English from the age of 11.
When we left Indonesia, he had managed to get a job back in Cape Town, which was his country of origin. We all went back there -- I have an older sister -- and that's when I started learning English. It was South African English. We stayed there until I was seven, so I had started school. And, at the time -- this was during Apartheid -- English-speaking schoolchildren were given Afrikaans, which is a Dutch-based language that's also spoken in Cape Town. So I had exposure to that at an early age also, as a classroom language.
But we also left Cape Town while I was still quite young, and that was a political move because my parents were active against the Apartheid regime and eventually were made unwelcome. So my parents had to leave -- my father lost his South African papers. Eventually we left because of the terrible state of politics there at the time, and we spent a short period in England, my mother's home.
Then we arrived in Canada, where my dad was able to get a job, and I grew up there from the age of nine. There, I learned to speak French. From the position of a native English speaker in Canada, there's a certain amount of -- a feeling of pressure to try to learn French.
What are some areas in which you do research?
My research has been in Central America, where I went to study a Mayan language. I guess I made the decision because of my interest in the connection between language and psychology. I made the decision that for my research I wanted to go back ... maybe thinking about this old Indonesian experience, I made the decision that I wanted to go back and learn a non-Indo-European language. A language that, as far as we know, is completely unrelated to English, Afrikaans, French -- the different languages that at that time I could speak. I'd forgotten all the Indonesian but I knew that it had once been present. So I looked around and I made the decision to work on Mayan.
What has been the most interesting part of your research experience?
Doing anthropological fieldwork, you enter such a different world. At least the kind of fieldwork that I do -- you're deliberately making the effort to put yourself in a situation where certain things will seem unfamiliar to you. The experience of living for a year in a peasant village in Central America ... pretty different from being a professor or graduate student.
What is your favorite book or movie?
One of my very favorite books is called "The Story of the Amulet." It was written by an author called E. Nesbit -- a British children's author -- about 100 years ago. I read it as a child, and it's a very romantic view of time travel, and archeology comes into it, [as well as] magic. So, looking at it now, with an adult's eyes, you see it a bit differently, but at the time it made a very powerful impression on me. I still think it's a marvelous book.
What is your favorite travel destination?
I really like traveling in France. It's a gorgeous country, and it has so many different regions.
-- Compiled by Hannah Woolf
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