The LSA is delighted to congratulate Sue Kalt, Professor of Spanish at Roxbury Community College, who has been awarded an eleven-month Documenting Endangered Languages Fellowship by the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities. She was also named as one of 26 community college faculty nationwide to receive the first American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)/Mellon Community College Faculty Fellowship for her project ‘Telling Stories Our Way: Changes in the Evidential System of Southern Quechua’.

The Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship is a $40k stipend that supports the research of community college professors. A maximum of 26 fellowships are awarded per year, and they are funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Documenting Endangered Languages Fellowship is awarded at a rate of $5k per month for up to twelve months in support of projects that document, archive and record languages that are at risk of being lost. 

Kalt’s project, YachaySimi.org, mentors heritage speakers to establish an intergenerational digital collection of videotaped stories told by Quechua-dominant speakers in the rural highlands of Chuquisaca, Bolivia. During the period funded by the two fellowships, she will work with north and south American graduate students on transcription, glossing, archiving and analysis of a corpus to build our mutual understanding of language acquisition, loss, and change. She and associates will return results to interviewees in the form of DVDs and captioned picture books in participants’ own words. Communities of science will also be able to access the corpus via the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America at the University of Texas, Austin. Kalt and her research associates are already working on several publications related to this corpus.

Congratulations to Sue Kalt from the LSA!