Kelsey holding an Amazon parrot in the field
Kelsey holding an Amazon parrot in the field

I am a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. My current project is "Documenting Diversification in the Yaminawa Dialect Complex (Panoan, Peru)”, funded by an NEH Dynamic Language Infrastructure - Documenting Endangered Languages Fellowship.

This project is a continuation of my previous project, "Multidialectal Lexical Documentation of Yaminahua, Nahua, and Sharanahua", funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme. Both of these projects seek to understand dialectal variation among four endangered languages in the Yaminawa Dialect Complex. My interests include language documentation and description, Amazonian linguistics, anthropological linguistics, and the social dimensions of language use.

I did my PhD in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. My dissertation focused on the phonetic, morphosyntactic, and social features of linguistic affect in Yaminahua and Nahua (Yora), two Panoan language varieties of Peruvian Amazonia. I have carried out fieldwork in Peru on Yaminahua and Nahua since 2013. I have also worked on Maij+ki (Western Tucanoan, Peru), Hup (Nadahup, Brazil), and Sereer (Niger-Congo, Senegal and The Gambia).