Colleen Alena O’Brien is a 2019-2020 Fulbright US Student Researcher, working on a project to document, describe and analyze Bahasa Gorontalo, the language of Gorontalo province in Sulawesi, Indonesia. With support from Universitas Negeri Gorontalo, she will record traditional stories, poems, songs, and conversations in the Gorontalo language and analyze the grammatical system.

Prior to her Fulbright year, Colleen was a DAAD-funded postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Latin American Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her dissertation is a grammatical description of Kamsá, a language isolate of southern Colombia.

Colleen’s previous research experiences have included documenting and describing the Kamsá language in Colombia and analyzing the syntax of Fataluku (a Papuan language) and Western Subanon (an Austronesian language). She also has been producing a feature-length documentary film about the ongoing peace process in Colombia.