Transmitting Indigenous, Vulnerable, and Endangered Languages | A Symposium

Moderator: Dr. Sara Feldman, Yiddish Preceptor, NELC

Speakers:

Wilfried Kuugauraq Zibell (A.B. ’21 in Comparative Literature) is a scholar of Yiddish and Indigenous literature, particularly focusing on displacement and its effects on identity formation and re-formation. Raised in the Inupiaq village of Noorvik, Alaska, the village’s Indigenous language and culture formed the bedrock of Wilfried’s life from a young age. Though not formally in academia at the moment, Wilfried has maintained an active participation in Indigenous and literary circles in Oxford, England where they now live.

Chaya R. Nove is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Linguistics at Brown University studying variation and change in New York Hasidic Yiddish and its prewar ancestral dialects. Previously, she held a postdoctoral position at UC Berkeley where she managed the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE). Chaya earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the CUNY Graduate Center and has received support for her research from the Association for Jewish Studies and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.

Américo Mendoza-Mori is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in literary, linguistic and cultural studies. His research focuses on Latin American, U.S. Latinx, and Indigenous communities. Dr. Mendoza-Mori teaches at Northeastern University’s World Languages and Cultures Department, is an affiliate at Harvard’s Committee on Ethnicity Migration, Rights. His work Indigenous cultures and Latino/Latin American Studies has appeared in a variety of academic journals, has been presented at the United Nations, and has been featured in The New York Times, Library of Congress, a TEDx talk, BBC, NPR. 

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP), the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights,(EMR), and the Jewish Cultures and Societies Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard.