Nick Thieberger home page

Qualifications: BA(Hons), MA (Linguistics, LaTrobe University), PhD (University of Melbourne)

e-mail:

ORCID ID: 0000-0001-8797-1018

ISNI Identifier: 0000 0001 0963 0154

VIAF Identifier: 31243678

My GoogleScholar citations

  • See a brief work history and projects I have run
  • See a list of my publications and invited presentations
  • See a list of some training sessions I have run
  • See recent media interviews

    • I am an Associate Professor in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne (Australia). I am adjunct at the University of Sydney, University of Hawai'i, and University of Tasmania. The LinguistList has a brief bio on their 'featured linguist' page here. I am also:

  • Director of PARADISEC
  • A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities
  • Lead CI in 'Nyingarn: a platform for primary sources in Australian Indigenous languages' 2021-2023
  • Chief Investigator in the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDACA)
  • Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language
  • Recipient of a Ludwig Leichhardt-Jubiläumsstipendium from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in November 2012
  • Deputy Director of the Research Unit for Indigenous Language at the University of Melbourne.
  • Chief Investigator in the ARC project "Hearing histories of the western Pilbara: an interdisciplinary study of Indigenous songs composed in the Pilbara region of Western Australia in the twentieth century and technologies to sustain them into the future"
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    Career highlights

  • Establishing the Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre (Wangka Maya) after community consultations in the mid-late 1980s and working there until the end of 1990
  • Building the Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archive (at AIATSIS 1991-1994)
  • Running the Paper and Talk conference in 1993 (which became the inspiration for the Breath of Life workshops in north America) and editing the book of the same name (downloadable here)
  • Establishing (with Margaret Florey) the Resource Network for Linguistic Diversity (now known as Living Languages)
  • Working at the Vanuatu Cutural Centre and building an electronic catalog of the museum collections (1995-1997)
  • Being part of the team that built the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) and continuing as its Project Manager, then Director
  • Learning the Nafsan (South Efate) language, building a corpus of archived material for the language and writing the first grammar that is embedded in a corpus of field recordings. A guide to the contents of the Nafsan collection can be found here
  • Building Kaipuleohone, the University of Hawai'i's digital ethnographic archive
  • In 2009 I was the chair of the 1st International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation and was on the organising committee for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation
  • Production of EOPAS, a system for presenting interlinear texts and media online (no longer functioning)
  • Building an accessible online form of the vocabularies from the Daisy Bates papers
  • Recipient of an ARC Australian Postdoctoral award (2004-2007); QEII Fellowship (2009-2014); Future Fellowship (2014-2018)
  • Editor of the journal Language Documentation & Conservation (2011-2021)
    •  I am working with speakers of Nafsan (South Efate) to produce a collection of narratives and a dictionary. I am an occasional blogger here: http://www.paradisec.org.au/blog/.

    Because I travel by air so much for my work, I have offset this carbon cost by investing in the Hepburn windfarm.

    This is a photo of me at a school on Tanna, southern Vanuatu, with the equivalent of a dunce's cap. The sign says "I must not speak language" and refers to not speaking the local indigenous language at school.

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