I am an educational linguist and a sociolinguist. I am a native speaker of Huanca Quechua, the variety of Quechua spoken in the central highlands of Peru. I also speak Ayacucho and Cuzco Quechua, and Spanish with native fluency.
I received my B.A. in Translation (English, French and Cuzco Quechua) from the Ricardo Palma University in Peru; I obtained my M.A. in Hispanic Linguistics from the Ohio State University, and my Ph.D. in Educational Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. I have published articles in Quechua, English and Spanish, and presented papers internationally. In addition, I have considerable experience in second and foreign language education, having been a Spanish and Quechua lecturer at various universities in Peru and the United States. Before joining Indiana University in 2007, I was an instructor at Princeton University for four years.
My research interests include revitalization of indigenous languages in the Americas, policies and politics of language, language attitudes and ideologies, minority languages and technology, language maintenance and shift, language contact phenomena, Indigenous literacies in the Americas, world languages and cultures acquisition, learning and teaching, issues of language, culture and identity in the Andes and beyond. My research is of an interdisciplinary nature, drawing on fields as diverse as macro- and micro-sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, education, ethnography of communication, language policy and planning, pragmatics, politics and history.