Call for Expressions of Interest - Two funded 2-year Master’s positions

Project: Breathing new life into legacy materials: Research and repatriation for a Sáliba collection

Principal Investigator (PI): Jorge Emilio Rosés Labrada (website with contact information)

Two fully-funded Master’s student positions are available as part of the SSHRC Insight Grant “Breathing new life into legacy materials: Research and repatriation for a Sáliba collection”, with a start date of September 2023 and for a two-year duration.

Desired qualifications:

  • BA in Linguistics or Anthropology (w/ strong linguistics foundation)

  • Conversational competency in Spanish

  • Some experience with language documentation software (e.g., ELAN, SayMore and/or FLEx)

What the project offers:

  • Funding: Both students will be funded for a period of 2 years, starting September 2023. The Master’s funding comes from a combination of research/teaching assistant duties (max. 12 hours per week) and a stipend. Read more on departmental graduate funding here. Additional funding (travel and living expenses) for fieldwork is available through the project.

  • Fieldwork experience: Both students will conduct fieldwork with the PI in Colombia. Training in documentation methodology, ethics and audiovisual recordings will be provided through coursework and one-on-one mentoring as part of the project.

  • Conference participation: The project will fund both students to attend a conference in North America to present their master’s projects in their second year. Potential master’s project topics are verbal person marking (morphosyntax) and the Sáliba vowel system (phonetics)—or other topic of interest to the student after consultation with the PI.

If interested, please send the following to jrosesla@ualberta.ca by November 30, 2022:

  1. one-page statement of interest (including description of qualifications / prior experience)

  2. CV

  3. writing sample (if available — e.g., an undergraduate thesis or research paper)