Yax Te' Staff
Laura
Martin is Professor Emerita of Modern Languages at Cleveland
State University. She is a linguist with special interests in the languages
of Mesoamerica. On the CSU faculty since 1970, she holds the BA (Spanish),
MA, and Ph.D. (Linguistics) from the University of Florida. She has done
field work in Guatemala and Mexico with speakers of Mocho' and Q'anjob'al,
both Mayan languages. Her scholarly research has always been Mayan grammar
and discourse, especially the role of parallelism in expressive culture.
With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National
Science Foundation, she is currently completing a major work on the endangered
Mayan language Mocho', spoken in Chiapas, Mexico. She held a Fulbright
Fellowship in Guatemala in 2004.
Dr. Martin has pursued an eclectic set of other research interests as well. She has published on Spanish dialectology, language and culture, and second-language acquisition - including a best-selling text on learning to read Spanish, Entre Líneas (Heinle and Heinle, 2nd edition, 1991). In addition, she co-authored Culture in Clinical Care, which presented a new approach to the field of cultural factors in healthcare. Perhaps her most famous article is her 1986 debunking of the myth of "Eskimo words for snow," which continues to produce lively debate in many circles. (For recent examples, click here.)
For more than 20 years, Dr. Martin directed the K'inal Winik Festival at Cleveland State, a public education program that brought current scholarship about the ancient and contemporary Maya to Cleveland area citizens, and especially to K-12 teachers and students around the state and nation. For the past several years, she has been active with various Maya-run organizations in Guatemala, conducting teacher workshops on Mayan literature, creativity in the classroom, and interdisciplinary approaches to cultural education. Her most recent project has been the creation of a web resource for the linguistic study of the Spanish of Guatemala. She has also been pursuing research on Luis de Lión and other aspects of contemporary Mayan literature. You can contact Dr. Martin at laura.martin@yaxtebooks.com.
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