Judith M. Maxwell, professor of Anthropology and Linguistics has been awarded a Fulbright Award from January – June 2010. She will be working and researching in Guatemala in collaboration with the Instituto de Lingüística y Educación (Institute of Linguistics and Education) of the Universidad Rafael Landívar.
Her projects include (a) training a cadre of bilingual linguists to teach Mayan languages using the methodology employed for the Tulane Intensive Kaqchikel course, Oxlajuj Aj; (b) continuing her research on Mayan sacred sites, documenting their location, their conservation, and their local histories; (c) writing a grammar of Chuj, a language that Maxwell worked on 36 years ago when she first went to Guatemala.
She had trained a group of Chuj speakers in linguistics. Together they made a dictionary of the language that was published in the 1990s after the worst of the genocide had died down. However, all but two of the men Maxwell had trained are dead, and one of the survivors has post-traumatic stress syndrome. This means the grammar that they had intended to write as a group will instead be written by Maxwell herself.
