Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Michigan
About
Barbra A. Meek is a Comanche citizen and professionally trained linguist and anthropologist. Raised in northeast Ohio, she studied in Sweden for a year before going to university. She completed two bachelor of arts degrees at the University of Akron, in philosophy and anthropology respectively. After a brief stint at New Mexico State University, she entered the joint PhD program in linguistics and anthropology at the University of Arizona, receiving her doctorate in 2001.
Since then, she has been employed as a faculty member at the University of Michigan, and was recently promoted to professor of anthropology and linguistics. She also serves as a faculty affiliate in Native American Studies and is in her second year of a three-year term as an elected member of the University’s Senate Assembly. In 2012 she received the Harold R. Johnson Diversity Service Award from the Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, followed more recently by the 2018 Rackham Distinguished Graduate Mentor award from Rackham Graduate School.
Current Work:
Meek’s research investigates processes of language endangerment and revitalization in North America, with an emphasis on children’s language socialization. Her ethnography, We Are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Athabaskan Community (University of Arizona Press, 2010) details the grammatical, social and ideological challenges that can come into play in First Nations language efforts. Related publications have appeared in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, and an edited volume with Paul Kroskrity, Engaging Native American Publics (Routledge, 2017).
In addition to this scholarship, Meek continues to be a part of on-going indigenous language documentation work and revitalization projects with First Nations in the Yukon Territory, Canada. She also joined a team of researchers at the University of Michigan on an MCubed project focused on Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe language) documentation and preservation in partnership with three Michigan tribes. Expanding her interest in linguistic description/documentation to representations of language more generally, her current research explores the interplay of language and representations of ethno-racial difference in mainstream media. Her book project, “Scripting the Native,” analyzes the linguistic dimensions of Hollywood actors’ performances of Native American characters compared across different sociohistorical contexts and genres, revealing some of the unexpected ways that language variation configures and perpetuates social stereotypes and categories of social difference.
Research Area Keyword(s):
First Nations languages, North America, language revitalization and endangerment, raciolinguistics
