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Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Erich Fox Tree presented two co-authored papers on Native American sign languages during the annual winter meetings of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, which took place in Boston on Jan. 3-6.

A picture may be worth 1000 words, but Kathleen Herlihy ’14 is only looking to find a few, albeit in a very literal sense. She is studying the use of sign language in art, a topic which she says has yet to be comprehensively analyzed by any scholarly work. She received an Emerson Foundation Summer Research Grant to pursue an initial scholarly analysis on this subject under the guidance of Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Erich Fox Tree.

Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Erich Fox Tree presented a lecture titled “Recovering the History and Prestige of Indigenous Sign Languages in Mesoamerica” on Oct. 7 at SUNY Oneonta. Fox Tree and his wife, Julia Gómez Ixmatá, a K'ichee' Maya from Guatemala, were interviewed in Spanish and K'ichee'-Maya on KPFK, a radio station serving the large first, second and third generation Maya immigrant population of Southern California on Oct. 10.

Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Erich Fox Tree presented “La Importancia de los Idiomas de Señas Indígenas para el Desciframiento de la Iconografía Mayas Antigua” (“The Importance of Indigenous Sign Languages for the Decipherment of Ancient Maya Iconography”) at the 25th Symposium on Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Research in Guatemala, July 18-22.

Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Erich Fox Tree has published a chapter titled “Global Linguistics, Mayan Languages, and the Cultivation of Autonomy” in the book Indigenous Peoples and Autonomy: Insights for a Global Age.