SSILA is happy to announce that Lev Michael, University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded the Victor Golla Prize.
The Victor Golla Prize is presented in recognition of a significant history of both linguistic scholarship and service to the scholarly community, with service that expands the quality and/or dissemination of such scholarship. The Prize, which bestows a life membership in SSILA on the recipient, seeks especially to honor those who strive to carry out interdisciplinary scholarship in the spirit of Victor Golla, combining excellent linguistic scholarship in one or more other allied fields, such as anthropology, education, history, or literature.
Lev exemplifies Victor’s virtues of scholarship grounded in an empirical practice that encompasses ongoing language documentation and text philology, pursuing answers to big-picture questions about areality and language change, and effectively integrated with service to a broad community. He excels in the area of South Americanist language documentation, linguistic analysis, and community language support.
His publications show depth and breadth in South American languages and families, as well as in extending to philology and history. They appear in IJAL, Journal of Language Contact, Language, Linguistic Typology, and Pragmatics and Society among other journals, and in volumes published by Benjamins, Cambridge, Oxford, and Routledge. His book A linguistic analysis of Old Omagua ecclesiastical texts (2016, co-authored with Zach O’Hagan) not only strengthens our understanding of the language, but shows clearly that Omagua crystallized before European contact. He is currently co-editing a Handbook of Amazonian languages for de Gruyter Mouton.
Lev has directed eight PhD dissertations and many undergraduate theses, and he has supervised half a dozen postdocs. His work with and impact on students and other younger scholars.
In impact to the field, Lev started the biennial Symposium on Amazonian Languages, which meets in Berkeley. In March of last year, SAL 3 had 21 talks by scholars from Brazil, Canada, and the US. Of course there are bigger events for Latin Americanists generally, but nothing comparable in North America for Amazonianists. He created SAPhon, the South American Phonological Inventory Database. This online resource contains information about phonological inventories for 363 South American languages, allowing users to view information about individual languages and sounds, with a map browsing function.
Lev and his research partner Chris Beier are absolutely committed to capacity building in the Amazonian communities where they work. This is a critical part of Lev’s pedagogy and mentoring of North American students, and shines through in his work. He does training and involves community members in the work he and Chris do, and makes sure there are results that benefit them. This includes (at least) dictionaries of Iquito, Máíhĩkì, and Muniche and pedagogical descriptions of Andoa, Iquito, and Muniche.
The committee found that Lev exemplify the spirit of this award through the breadth, quality, and availability of his research, his success in engagement with communities, and by the inspiration he brings to new generations of linguists.