Fulbright Student Researcher Grace B. Wivell is a farm girl turned English teacher turned linguist. She is currently a PhD candidate in Stony Brook University’s Linguistics department.

For her present research, Grace is working to document better the language of Lio, an understudied Austronesian language spoken in Central Flores, intending to complete a morpho-syntactic sketch of the language for her dissertation. She also intends to continue the ongoing work she began virtually with Lio-speaking communities in the region, developing trilingual (Lio-Indonesian-English) teaching materials. She is affiliated with Universitas Flores and is working with Professor Yosef Bataona. She looks forward to learning more about the Lio language and culture and collaborating with community members in the region to ensure her linguistic research is of value to speakers.

Grace has been privileged to live, work, and study in several regions of Indonesia, including Malang and Jakarta on Java, Gorontalo on Sulawesi, and Wolondopo on Flores. It is her experience in Indonesia that led to her interest in the languages of the region and, perhaps more importantly, the ways communities ensure their languages are spoken for generations to come.

She received a bachelor’s in English teaching from Ithaca College and a master’s in TESOL from Stony Brook University.

And, of course, in keeping with her farm girl roots, she looks forward to meeting plenty of cows along the way.