The Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas is pleased to announce that Dr. Aaron Broadwell has been awarded the Victor Golla Prize.
Aaron Broadwell’s record of contributions to our field and to the communities he works with, together with rich attestations of his impact through letters of support, resulted in the ad hoc committee’s unanimous and enthusiastic decision to award him the prize.
Aaron Broadwell with a Timucua bowl. Photo by University of Florida/Lyon Duong, used by permission of University of Florida.
The Victor Golla Prize is presented in recognition of a significant history of both linguistic scholarship and service to the scholarly community, with service that expands the quality and/or dissemination of such scholarship. The prize, which bestows a lifetime membership in SSILA on the recipient, seeks especially to honor those who strive to carry out interdisciplinary scholarship in the spirit of Victor Golla.
Aaron is the Elling Eide Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida. His scholarship spans an impressive number of languages of the Americas, including Choctaw, Zapotec, Kaqchikel, and Timucua. Aaron’s work is both descriptive and theoretical. He tackles synchronic and diachronic questions, and his work covers a broad range of areas of grammatical interest, including phonology, morphology, semantics, and, of course, syntax.
His numerous publications include two reference grammars for Choctaw (2006) and Timucua (in press), scores of articles, and Ticha: an online digital text explorer for Colonial Zapotec, with Brook Lilleghaugen and others, also open access (http://ticha.haverford.edu/). Many of these projects, including the Copala Triqui dictionary (http://copalatriqui.webonary.org) and Zapotec philology projects (http://sandionisiozapotec.webonary.org) are highly collaborative, working closely with community members over many years. These projects and much of his work is designed to be accessible for the communities he works with. One collaborative project Caseidyneën Saën – Learning Together: Colonial Valley Zapotec Teaching Materials received three awards in 2021, including Best Digital Humanities Project from the Latin American Studies Association (http://ds-wordpress.haverford.edu/ticha-resources/modules/). Most recently, he is serving as a project linguist on an NEH-DEL Mississippi Choctaw Dictionary and Comparison of Community Dialects award (2020-2023).
A requirement for the Golla Prize is that the awardee strives to carry out interdisciplinary scholarship, combining excellent linguistic scholarship in one or more other allied fields. Aaron’s work is notable for its breadth in a range of disciplines beyond linguistics. He has done work of interest to anthropologists, historians, and Indigenous language practitioners. Aaron’s research on the North Florida language Timucua is representative of this multi-disciplinary approach. He has spearheaded the collection, translation, and analysis of Timucua texts and creation of an open access dictionary (https://www.webonary.org/timucua/). Although he has worked on the grammar of Timucua, for which there is very little prior research, he has also used the texts to investigate the history of Timucuan people themselves, the colonial rule, and interactions between the Timucua and the Spanish. His talks have touched on the social hierarchy at the time of Timucua contact, issues of textual analysis, Native voices, aspects of daily Timucuan life under colonial rule, and more.
His service record is likely known personally to many of our membership. He has served as the SSILA In Memoriam editor for many years, and was on the SSILA ad hoc committee for our conference talks to address the broader social significance of their work and of the different types of impact that the research can have in specific contexts. He has served on the board of the Endangered Language Fund. And in 2018, Aaron directed the Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang) at the University of Florida, which engages community and non-community scholars and students in a collaborative learning and knowledge sharing experience. He is also a generous mentor, as warmly attested in the letters of support and which many in our Society have been fortunate to benefit from first hand.
In sum, Aaron Broadwell’s research, collaborations, and mentoring Aaron’s research have been impressively broad and inclusive. His abundant scholarship and service, enacted with such grace and good humor, is humbling. We congratulate him and celebrate this honor with him.