People who have contributed to the Austkin Project


Dr Patrick McConvell (The Australian National University) is the Chief Investigator on the AustKin project and holder of a Discovery Outstanding Research Award. He received his PhD from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. He has taught anthropology and linguistics at Australian universities, trained Indigenous people in working with their own languages and helped establish Aboriginal language centres and bilingual education programs. He was R. Marika Guest Professor, University of Cologne in 2012.
Dr Harold Koch (The Australian National University) completed a doctorate on comparative Indo-European linguistics at Harvard in 1973 before commencing  several decades of research into Kaytetye and the other Arandic languages of Central Australia. He is co-editor with Dr Rachel Nordlinger of The Languages and Linguistics of Australia: A Comprehensive Guide (De Gruyter Mouton, 2014) as well as Australian languages: classification and the comparative method (John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2004) with Associate Professor Claire Bowern and Aboriginal placenames: Naming and re-naming the Australian landscape (ANU E Press and Aboriginal History, 2009) with Luise Hercus. His research interests include comparing languages and reconstructing their prehistory as well as gleaning information on languages from old written sources.
Professor Laurent Dousset (EHESS – Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, CREDO) is an anthropologist working since 1994 on Australian Aboriginal cultures, he is particularly interested in kinship, social organisation and social transformations, as well as conceptions and issues of land tenure and inter-cultural relationships. He wrote the Austkin program, database system and the information schema, as well as contributed to the public website design. Since 2008 he is also working in Vanuatu on political organization and change. He has published or edited seven books (among them Australian Aboriginal Kinship: An introductory handbook with particular emphasis on the Western Desert. Marseille: pacific-credo Publications, 2011) and numerous papers in scientific journals. He is also the creator of the digital archival framework ODSAS.
Professor Jane Simpson (The Australian National University) is Chair of Indigenous Linguistics at The Australian National University, and Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language.   She works on Australian Aboriginal languages, especially syntax and semantics, but also place-names, dictionaries, land-claims, kinship systems, and reconstructing what languages were like from old written sources.  She is currently working on a longitudinal study of Aboriginal children learning their first language. Other projects include work on intercultural communication, and Australian English lexicons.
Jeanie Bell (Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education) is a language custodian, long time community linguist, language activist and educator who has lived and worked in Queensland, Victoria and the Northern Territory. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Australian Languages and Linguistics at Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education. Jeanie gained an MA in Linguistics from the University of Melbourne for her thesis A sketch grammar of the Badjala language of Gari (Fraser Island) and has done work on reviving Badjala, a variety of the Gabi-Gabi language of southeastern Queensland.
Dr Piers Kelly (The Australian National University) was project manager and research assistant on the AustKin project from 2013 to mid-2014. His own research encompasses linguistic creativity, writing systems, folk literacy practices and Philippine languages.

Meghan McGrath (Indiana University) is a digital cultural heritage consultant and folklorist from Chicago. Meghan contributed in the website design, consulting widely with language owners, linguists, teachers and Native Title researchers.

Dr Rachel Hendery (University of Western Sydney) is coeditor of Grammatical Change: Theory and Description and author of Relative Clauses in Time and Space: A Case Study in the Methods of Diachronic Typology.

Reserach associates

Dr. Woody W. Denham has a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Washington. He is responsible for the Alyawarra Ethnographic Archive and the Group Compositions in Band Societies database. He has published on kinship, hunter-gatherer societies, information systems and primate anthropology.
Dr Ian Keen (The Australian National University) gained a BSc in anthropology at University College London (1973) and a PhD in anthropology at The Australian National University (1979). He has conducted anthropological fieldwork in northeast Arnhem Land, the Alligator Rivers region, and McLaren Creek in the Northern Territory of Australia, and in Gippsland, Victoria. His current research includes the diversity and typology of Australian Aboriginal kinship systems, and the language of property.
Dr Barry Alpher has published a dictionary of Yir-Yoront and is currently working on problems of comparative Pama-Nyungan and writing up field materials on Yir-Yoront, Yirrk-Mel, Ogunyjan, Pakanh and algol in Cape York Peninsula. He has taught anthropology and linguistics at Arizona State University and at the University of Sydney, taught at and headed the School of Australian Linguistics in Batchelor, Northem Territory, and worked in applied linguistics and anthropology with Native Americans, with Spanish-speaking migrant workers in the United States of America, and with Aboriginal Australians.
Associate Professor Claire Bowern (Yale University) completed a PhD  from Harvard University examining the historical morphology of complex verb constructions in a family of non-Pama-Nyungan (Australian) languages. Her research focuses on the Indigenous languages of Australia, and is concerned with language documentation/description and prehistory. This includes fieldwork in Northern Australia with speakers of endangered languages, as well as archival work, shedding light on the linguistic history of Pama-Nyungan. With colleagues in linguistics, anthropology, and evolutionary biology, she is currently comparing features of hunter-gatherer languages in different areas of the world.
Professor Andrew Pawley (The Australian National University) studies Pacific Island languages and culture history, and has done fieldwork in Fiji, Samoa and Papua New Guinea. He is currently collaborating on a seven volume series using lexical comparisons to reconstruct the culture and environment of Proto Oceanic speakers; completing dictionaries of Kalam (Papua New Guinea), Wayan (Western Fiji) and Gela (Solomon Is.); and working  with Ian Saem Majnep on a book on Kalam ethnobotany.
Dr Joe Blythe completed his PhD in Linguistics at the University of Sydney in 2009, and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Australian National University (2009-2010) and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands (2010-2013). He has conducted field research on the Kija and Jaru languages of northern Western Australia and continues fieldwork with speakers of the Murrinh-Patha language of Australia’s Northern Territory.
James W.W. Rose is a forensic social anthropologist at the native title representative body NTSCORP Ltd in Redfern, Sydney. He specializes in kinship network analysis, geographic information systems, and geospatial population dynamics. James has acted as primary expert witness to 10 native title claims in South East Australia, including two 10 million hectare claims in western NSW, and has conducted numerous research projects with traditional owners in Central and Northern Australia over more than a decade. James is a doctoral researcher in the School of Population & Global Health in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Melbourne.