Dr. Colleen Alena O’Brien

• PhD in Linguistics University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Title of Dissertation: A grammatical description Kamsá, a language isolate of Colombia. December 2018
• M.A. in Linguistics, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. May 2013.
• B.A. in Anthropology & Classical Languages, University of Miami. May 2010

• Fulbright Fellowship. Project: “Description and documentation of the Gorontalo Language of Sulawesi.” Gorontalo, Indonesia. November 2019–July 2020
• Postdoctoral Fellowship. DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst). Faculty of Latin American Studies, Freie Universität, Berlin. December 2018–August 2019
• Visiting Researcher, Faculty of Law, Universidad Libre, Bogotá, Colombia. 2015–2017

• Reintegration of ex-combatants in Colombia
• Effects of peace processes on indigenous peoples
• Documentation, description, and preservation of indigenous languages

• English (native)
• Spanish (fluent)
• Indonesian (conversational)
• Classical Greek and Latin (reading)
• Kamsá, Gorontalo, Czech, German, Italian, Swahili, Fataluku, Miskitu, and Subanon (studied and/or researched)

At the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

• Linguistics 102: An Introduction to the Study of Language
• Classics 122: Greek and Roman Mythology
• Greek and Latin Roots of English

• Language Endangerment and Revitalization in Colombia: New political challenges (2019). Paper presented at the Ninth Cambridge Conference on Language Endangerment. University of Cambridge. 02 July 2019
• Transformation of the ETCRs: (Espacios Territoriales de Capacitación y Reincorporación) in Colombia and the implications for peace (2019). Paper presented at Colombian Days. Jena, Germany. 27–28 May 2019
• Between Noun Class and Classifier: The case of Kamsá (2019). Paper present at Noun Categorization: From Grammar to Communicative Interaction. Lyon, France. 18–19 April 2019
• In search of Practical Peacebuilding Strategies for a Changing Colombia (2019). Paper presented at the Society for Applied Anthropology Portland, OR, USA. 19–23 March 2019
• Retos de reintegración de las FARC: una perspectiva del cine etnográfico (2018). Paper presented in: Entendiendo a los grupos excombatientes: Metodologías alternativas para la investigación del conflicto armado colombiano. Workshop held at: Lateinamerikanische Institut FU-Berlin. 19 December 2018
• Speaker perceptions of language change: Contact and endangerment of Camsá (2017). Paper presented at the Seventh Cambridge Conference on Language Endangerment. University of Cambridge. 04 July 2017
• The mysterious case of =em: Grammaticalization of a serial verb construction in Fataluku. with Yuko Otsuka (2017). Paper presented at APLL 9 (Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics Conference). Paris, France. June 2017
• No to peace: Contextualizing the Colombian conflict (2017). Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology. Santa Fe, NM, USA. March 2017
• Creating relevant curricula for endangered languages in Colombia (2016). Paper presented at the Sixth Cambridge Conference on Language Endangerment. University of Cambridge. July 6, 2016
• At the crossroads of language death: Displacement, language loss, and identity in Colombia (2016). Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, Vancouver, BC, Canada. March 2016
• What we say and what we mean: Technical and aesthetic considerations of street slang. With Bryan Page (2015). Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology. Pittsburgh, PA, USA. March 2015

• Assessing cost-effectiveness in reintegrating ex-combatants in Colombia (2020). Under review
• Color salience, color term evolution, and the issue of relatedness. With Caleb Everett (2020). Evolang 13 Proceedings
• Reintegration vs. Reincorporation: Is collective reincorporation possible in Colombia? (2020). Submitted
• Conducting fieldwork with the FARC: Conversations about violence during a research project in Colombia (2019). Submitted
• Cultural protection in Colombia: Reflections on indigenous data Sovereignty for understanding structural injustice in a context of war. With Gustavo Rojas-Páez (2020). Submitted
• The challenges of Kamsá language revitalization in Colombia (2019). Chapter in: Rejecting marginalized status: Educational projects and curricula pushing back against language endangerment. Edited by Ari Sherris and Susan Penfield. Bristol: Multilingual Matters

• Ethnographic filmmaking