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Anthony Webster |
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| Research interests | Courses |
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| My research focuses on Native American verbal and orthographic art and it especially concerns Navajo and Apache poetry and poetics. I am deeply interested in the relationship between oral poetry and written poetry, particularly as these issues relate to debates concerning cognition and the influences of literacy on said cognition. I am also concerned with the documentation, promotion, and expression of Athabaskan languages (Navajo and Apache). Recently, I have been researching Navajo poetry and the ways that Navajo poets use English and Navajo to assert Navajo identities. Further, I have begun research on Navajo “rap singers” and the way they use Navajo to articulate a sense of “Navajoness.” All of this, of course, connects with the maintenance and perpetuation of the Navajo language. These issues also resurface in my work with Apache speakers. Central, then, to my work is how “pop culture” is an avenue for language maintenance and perpetuation; and, to follow this line of thought, how identity is mutually or temporarily co-constructed through or in spite of language. | Anth 300B:
Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology Anth/Ling 406: Introduction to Historical Linguistics ANTH 310K/470K: Native Peoples of the Southwest Anth/Ling 421: Phonetics and Phonology Anth 485: Native American Verbal Art Anth 500B: Linguistic Anthropology: Methods and Theory |
| Selected publications | |
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"Reflections on Navajo Poetry: Translation, Ideophony, and Reckoning" (being published on-line at World Literature Today) |
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