Biography
Dr. Judith M. Maxwell received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1982. She works on discourse primarily within Mayan languages, particularly those of the K'iche'an and Q'anjob'alan families. Questions that interest her within discourse are canons for artistry, encoding of cultural constructs, mechanisms of coherence, co-reference and tracking, knowledge, and belief states, presuppositions, creating and indexing societal relationships, alignments, animacy hierarchies in relationship to syntactic and pragmatic structures, and masking. Dr. Maxwell also works with contemporary language issues: the processes of standardization, language maintenance and shift, bilingual/multicultural education, and issues of language, identity, and authenticity.
Further information about Professor Judith Maxwell is available via the Tulane University Department of Anthropology.