Colleen Fitzgerald

Colleen M. Fitzgerald is an American linguist who specializes in phonology, as well as language documentation and revitalization, especially with Native American languages.[1] She is the Associate Vice President for research at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. Previously she was a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and TESOL[2][3] the University of Texas at Arlington where she directed the Native American Languages Lab.[4] She formerly served as chair of the department.[5]

She earned her doctorate in linguistics in 1997 at the University of Arizona.[6] Her dissertation focused on prosody in Tohono O'odham, an Uto-Aztecan language.[7] She has published on Tohono O'odham, as well as other languages. Her other publications are on the topic of service learning in linguistics, including in indigenous language revitalization courses.

Fitzgerald served as Director of the 2014 Institute on Collaborative Research,[8] or CoLang 2014.[9][10] This was the fourth iteration of this international training workshop in language documentation and revitalization.[11] With linguist Mary Linn, she co-directed the 2012 and 2014 Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshops.[12]

From 2015-2019 she served as the Program Director for the Documenting Endangered Languages program at the National Science Foundation.[13] In 2017 she was an invited plenary speaker at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting, talking on, "The Sounds of Indigenous Language Revitalization."[14]