Kristine Hildebrandt received her Ph.D. in linguistics from UC Santa Barbara in 2003. She was a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Leipzig between 2003-2005, where she designed a database to query the theory and typology of prosodic words, part of the larger Autotyp project. Between 2005-2008 Kristine was a lecturer in the Linguistics and English Language program at the University of Manchester, and she joined the department of English Language and Literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 2008 as one of the linguistics faculty. Kristine’s main professional interests and areas of specialization include language documentation, tonal phonetics and phonology, field methods (particularly field laboratory settings for phonetic and phonological analysis), and intersecting areas of language contact and language endangerment, maintenance, and preservation. Kristine is particularly enthralled by Sino-Tibetan languages, as well as languages of South and Southeast Asia in general.

James N. Stanford is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. His research focuses on language variation and change in less commonly studied indigenous communities, including minority languages of East/Southeast Asia and Native American communities. He also conducts field research on Eastern New England English features in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. He co-edited Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages (with Dennis Preston; Benjamins Publishing, 2009), and he publishes articles in Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language Variation and Change, Language in Society, Asia Pacific Language Variation, American Speech, and other journals.

Mark Turin (PhD, Linguistics, Leiden University, 2006) is an anthropologist, linguist and broadcaster. He is Chair of the First Nations Languages Program and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He also hold an appointment as Visiting Associate Professor at the Yale School Forestry & Environmental Studies. Before joining UBC, he held positions at the South Asian Studies Council at Yale University, where he was the founding Program Director of the Yale Himalaya Initiative. Previously, Turin was a Research Associate at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

Turin directs both the World Oral Literature Project, an urgent global initiative to document and make accessible endangered oral literatures before they disappear without record, and the Digital Himalaya Project which he co-founded in 2000 as a platform to make multi-media resources from the Himalayan region widely available online.

Turin has held research appointments at Cornell and Leipzig universities, as well as the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology in Sikkim, India. From 2007 to 2008, he served as Chief of Translation and Interpretation at the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN).

Mark Turin writes and teaches on language documentation, conservation, and revitalization; with research interests oral traditions, ethnolinguistics, visual anthropology, digital archives and fieldwork methodologies. He is the author or co-author of four books, three travel guides, the editor of eight volumes, the co-editor of the peer-reviewed, open access journal HIMALAYA and he edits an open access monograph series on oral literature. Mark is a regular radio presenter on issues of linguistic diversity and language endangerment.

web: http://markturin.arts.ubc.ca

twitter: @markturin