I have always been a curious person, and I traveled a winding, indirect path to my current research interests.  As an undergraduate, I studied Cultural Anthropology and Nonfiction Writing.  My dream, then, was to be a culture writer for a widely-respected publication (read: National Geographic!!).  I wanted to travel the world and meet people whose lifestyles were vastly different from my own, then I wanted to talk about it.  It’s through education, awareness, and closeness, I thought, that we eliminate fear and nurture the basic underlying sameness of us all.

Throughout my 20s, I managed to do quite a bit of traveling, including some time lived abroad, which fed my hunger for lifestyles different from my own.  Through these experiences, I was developing a theme:  I am interested in understanding what is universal to the human condition, the degrees of variance we find, and why.  What makes us all the same, in what ways are we different from each other, and why do these differences and universalities exist and persist?

As my path narrowed, and as I arrived closer to some of the questions I find myself pursuing now, I find that one of the big answers (and thereby questions) is in fact language.  Language is one piece of what makes us all the same, as it is a universal of the human experience.  It is also one of the ways we vary from each other, and it is an important, complicated thread to follow in understanding the development of our species.

Beyond language, some of my other main interests are Asian culture, human origins and evolution, ancient civilizations and archaeology, and Buddhism.