Joel Sherzer


Joel Fred Sherzer is an American anthropological linguist known for his research with the Guna people of Panama and his focuses on verbal art and discourse-centered approaches to linguistic research. He co-founded the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America. Sherzer completed his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 and thereafter taught at the University of Texas at Austin for his entire career.

Awards

Over the course of his research career, Sherzer observed that scholars were creating substantial collections of recordings and texts in indigenous Latin American languages, and he was concerned about the preservation of these priceless collections of indigenous verbal art. In 2001, Sherzer, along with Anthony Woodbury and Mark McFarland, founded the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America to collect, digitize, and permanently preserve these resources and make them freely available over the internet.

Works