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Faculty, Summer 2019
Tod Dillon Swanson Associate Professor, Arizona State University, PhD University of Chicago, is the on-site director for the Pitt in Ecuador program. He is a specialist in Amazonian culture and environment. His areas of research include indigenous relations to plant and animal species and Quichua linguistics.
Dr. Janis B. Nuckolls is Professor of Linguistics at Brigham Young University. anthropological linguist with field experience primarily in Amazonian Ecuador, province of Pastaza. Her research interests center upon the cultural poetics of Quichua verbal practice and the role of ideophones and grammatical categories such as evidentiality in the expression of attitudinal alignments with nonhuman nature. She is the author of Sounds Like Life: Sound Symbolic Grammar, Performance, and Cognition in Pastaza Quechua and Lessons from a Quechua Strong Woman: Ideophany, Dialogue and Perspective. Her current research projects involve putting together various ‘pieces’ of Quichua grammar, including its phonology and verbal morphology, and delving more deeply into the possible role played by ideophony in the communication of unconventional knowledge. Web page and Curriculum Vitae
Walter P. Carson received his Ph. D. in 1993 with Richard Root at Cornell University, performed his postdoctoral studies with David Tilman at the University of Minnesota and Steve Hubbell at Princeton University, and joined the Department in 1994. As a Fellow in Sustainability, Carson is tackling threats to habitat sustainability and biodiversity using a broad framework grounded in policy research. Dr. Carson will teach Tropical Ecology during the June 2017 session.
Dr. Dyer is a tropical ecologist whose current research focusses on tritrophic interactions, chemical ecology, biodiversity, and conservation in natural and managed ecosystems. Dr. Dyer will contribute to the Tropical Ecology course from July 15-21, 2017. Curriculum Vitae; web site
Pieter C. Muysken, Professor of Linguistics, Radboud University Nijmegen. Dr. Muysken's work in Historical Linguistics has focussed on language contact. He is currently working on a book that will examine the history of Ecuadorian Quichua including the origins of its various dialects. Curriculum Vitae
Michael Severino Patterson teaches Quichua at the Andes and Amazon Field School. As a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Tena area he met his wife Jackie and learned Quichua fluently. He later helped to organize Quichua language education for Peace Corps Volunteers. During the Academic year. Mike Teaches Biology, Agricultural Science, and Prairie Management at Scattergood, a private high school in Iowa. He holds and MA in Science education from the University of Iowa. Mike will be teaching Kichwa during the June and July sessions.
Kathleen Allen, Senior Lecturer, University of Pittsburgh, is an archaeologist and potter interested in the intersection between contemporary Indigenous potters, cultural identity, and the interpretation of prehistoric pottery assemblages. She has taken workshops on Native pottery manufacture from contemporary Mohawk and Acoma potters, and has focused on hand-building pottery using pinch, coil and slab techniques of manufacture. She has taught courses on Native perspectives on pottery making for ten years and especially values working with the expert artisans in Amazonian Ecuador. Dr. Allen will be teach Amazonian Arts: Making and Meaning during the June 2017 session.