Studies and academic career
Burkhart studied for a B.A. in anthropology at Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, graduating summa cum laude in 1980. Her postgraduate studies were undertaken at Yale, where in 1982 she completed a M.Phil. in anthropology. Her course work included field research conducted in Mexico on Nahuatl language, literature, and communities. [2]
After obtaining her master's degree Burkhart enrolled in Yale's doctorate studies program in anthropology, while also working as instructor and teaching assistant for courses on Nahuatl literature and Native American ethnography. Burkhart was awarded her Ph.D. in 1986, where her dissertation was supervised by renowned Mayanist scholar Michael D. Coe. Her dissertation, "The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico", was revised and published as a book in 1989 by University of Arizona Press.
In 1987 Burkhart received an American Philosophical Society Fellowship grant to conduct archival research in Madrid. Other fellowships and research grants obtained during the late 1980s include ones from Chicago's Newberry Library, a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for the John Carter Brown Library, and a fellowship in pre-Columbian studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. During this time Burkhart also held adjunct and visiting lecturer positions at the University of Connecticut (1986–87) and Purdue University (1989–90). [2]
In 1990 Burkhart joined the faculty at SUNY Albany as assistant professor. In conjunction with her ongoing academic research projects and publications, Burkhart has taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses at Albany. These include courses on Native American and Mesoamerican myths and folklore, ethnological theory, Mesoamerican texts and literature, anthropology and ethnology of Native American religion and pre-Columbian art, and Nahuatl language instruction. In 1997 Burkhart reached the academic rank of associate professor, and became a full professor in 2003. Her professorial appointment is jointly held between the Anthropology Department and the Department of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. [2]
Ehecatl is a pre-Columbian deity associated with the wind, who features in Aztec mythology and the mythologies of other cultures from the central Mexico region of Mesoamerica. He is most usually interpreted as the aspect of the Feathered Serpent deity as a god of wind, and is therefore also known as Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl. Ehecatl also figures prominently as one of the creator gods and culture heroes in the mythical creation accounts documented for pre-Columbian central Mexican cultures.
In Mesoamerican and Toltec spiritual traditions, a Nagual refers to a human being who can access spiritual power through transformation or deep connection with their tonal counterpart. This ability is not merely about shapeshifting but also about guiding spiritual development and fostering personal transformation by bridging the physical and metaphysical realms.
The Aztec or Mexica calendar is the calendrical system used by the Aztecs as well as other Pre-Columbian peoples of central Mexico. It is one of the Mesoamerican calendars, sharing the basic structure of calendars from throughout the region.
The Nahuas are a Uto-Nahuan ethnicity and one of the indigenous people of Mexico, with Nahua minorities also in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. They comprise the largest indigenous group in Mexico, as well as the largest population out of any North American Indigenous people group who are native speakers of their respective indigenous language. Amongst the Nahua, this is Nahuatl. When ranked amongst all Indigenous languages across the Americas, Nahuas list third after speakers of Guaraní and Quechua.
Miguel León-Portilla was a Mexican anthropologist and historian, specializing in Aztec culture and literature of the pre-Columbian and colonial eras. Many of his works were translated to English and he was a well-recognized scholar internationally. In 2013, the Library of Congress of the United States bestowed on him the Living Legend Award.
Zelia Maria Magdalena Nuttall was an American archaeologist and anthropologist who specialised in pre-Aztec Mexican cultures and pre-Columbian manuscripts. She discovered two forgotten manuscripts of this type in private collections, one of them being the Codex Zouche-Nuttall. She decoded the Aztec calendar stone and was one of the first to identify and recognise artefacts dating back to the pre-Aztec period. Nuttall can also be credited for being first to ever challenge the prevailing theory of a California landing for Francis Drake's circumnavigation in spite of much adversity. She boldly proposed that Drake had sailed further North into the Pacific Northwest. Numerous northern coast researchers reexamined the few available records as a result.
Classical Nahuatl, also known simply as Aztec or Codical Nahuatl and Colonial Nahuatl, is a set of variants of Nahuatl spoken in the Valley of Mexico and central Mexico as a lingua franca at the time of the 16th-century Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. During the subsequent centuries, it was largely displaced by Spanish and evolved into some of the modern Nahuan languages in use. Although classified as an extinct language, Classical Nahuatl has survived through a multitude of written sources transcribed by Nahua peoples and Spaniards in the Latin script.
The traditions of indigenous Mesoamerican literature extend back to the oldest-attested forms of early writing in the Mesoamerican region, which date from around the mid-1st millennium BCE. Many of the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica are known to have been literate societies, who produced a number of Mesoamerican writing systems of varying degrees of complexity and completeness. Mesoamerican writing systems arose independently from other writing systems in the world, and their development represents one of the very few such origins in the history of writing.
Fray Ángel María Garibay Kintana was a Mexican Roman Catholic priest, philologist, linguist, historian, and scholar of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, specifically of the Nahua peoples of the central Mexican highlands. He is particularly noted for his studies and translations of conquest-era primary source documents written in Classical Nahuatl, the lingua franca of Postclassic central Mexico and the then-dominant Aztec empire. Alongside his former student Miguel León-Portilla, Garibay ranks as one of the pre-eminent Mexican authorities on the Nahuatl language and its literary heritage, and as one who has made a significant contribution towards the promotion and preservation of the indigenous cultures and languages of Mexico.
Floyd Glenn Lounsbury was an American linguist, anthropologist and Mayanist scholar and epigrapher, best known for his work on linguistic and cultural systems of a variety of North and South American languages. Equally important were his contributions to understanding the hieroglyphs, culture and history of the Maya civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
New Philology generally refers to a branch of Mexican ethnohistory and philology that uses colonial-era native language texts written by Indians to construct history from the indigenous point of view. The name New Philology was coined by James Lockhart to describe work that he and his doctoral students and scholarly collaborators in history, anthropology, and linguistics had pursued since the mid-1970s. Lockhart published a great many essays elaborating on the concept and content of the New Philology and Matthew Restall published a description of it in the Latin American Research Review.
Ross Hassig is an American historical anthropologist specializing in Mesoamerican studies, particularly the Aztec culture. His focus is often on the description of practical infrastructure in Mesoamerican societies. He is the author of several influential books, among them: Time, History, and Belief in Aztec and Colonial Mexico; Aztec Warfare: Imperial Expansion and Political Control; and Trade, Tribute, and Transportation: The Sixteenth-Century Political Economy of the Valley of Mexico.
Elizabeth Hill Boone is an American art historian, ethnohistorian and academic, specializing in the study of Latin American art and in particular the early colonial and pre-Columbian art, iconography and pictorial codices associated with the Mixtec, Aztec and other Mesoamerican cultures in the central Mexican region. Her extensive published research covers investigations into the nature of Aztec writing, the symbolism and structure of Aztec art and iconography and the interpretation of Mixtec and Aztec codices.
Richard A. Diehl is an American archaeologist, anthropologist, academic, and scholar of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures. He has made extensive contributions to the study of the Olmecs' civilization, which flourished in the Gulf Coast of Mexico region during the pre-classic period in Mesoamerica.
Charles Elliot Dibble was an American academic, anthropologist, linguist, and scholar of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures. A former Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah, Dibble retired in 1978 after an association with the university as lecturer and researcher spanning four decades. Post-retirement Dibble continued to conduct and publish research in his area of expertise, studies of Mesoamerican historical literature and the historiography of conquest-era Mesoamerican cultures, in particular those of the Aztec and others of the central Mexican altiplano. Among many contributions to the field Dibble is perhaps most recognised for his collaboration with colleague Arthur J.O. Anderson, producing the modern annotated translation into English of the volumes of the Florentine Codex.
Lisa Sousa is an American academic historian active in the field of Latin American studies. A specialist in the colonial-era history of Latin America and of Colonial Mexico in particular, Sousa is noted for her research, commentary, and translations of colonial Mesoamerican literature and Nahuatl-language historical texts. She has also published research on historical and contemporary indigenous peoples in Mexico, the roles of women in indigenous societies and cultural definitions of gender. Sousa is a full professor in the History Department at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California.
Frances Esther Karttunen, also known as Frances Ruley Karttunen, is an American academic linguist, historian and author.
Nahuatl, Aztec, or Mexicano is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about 1.7 million Nahuas, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have smaller populations in the United States.
Indigenous American philosophy is the philosophy of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. An Indigenous philosopher is an Indigenous American person who practices philosophy and draws upon the history, culture, language, and traditions of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Many different traditions of philosophy exist in the Americas, and have from Precolumbian times.
Jose Jorge Klor de Alva, is a Mexican-born anthropologist, the president of Nexus Research and Policy Center, an independent research and policy advocacy organization for the improvement of college education of nontraditional and underserved students. He is also chairman of 3DMX, Inc., a technology company in Silicon Valley that focuses, through its Mexico-based University of Advanced Technologies, on education and training programs in digital and advanced manufacturing technologies. He was previously the Class of 1940 Professor at UC-Berkeley and Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.
