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Amanda Minks is Associate Professor in the Honors College and is
affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and with the programs in
Native American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at OU. She
earned a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University in 2006, with
research specializations in music-language relations and language
socialization. Her courses focus on music, language, and cultural
politics in the Americas. She also teaches a course with a global focus
on intellectual property and cultural heritage.
Dr. Minks has conducted ethnographic research on the Atlantic coast
of Nicaragua for over ten years. She has examined the aesthetics and
politics of play among Miskitu children living on Corn Island in her
monograph Voices of Play: Miskitu Children's Speech and Song on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua (University
of Arizona Press, 2013). She has also written about Miskitu music and
community media in Bilwi, in the northern autonomous region of the
Atlantic coast. Most recently, she has been studying inter-American
cultural policies of the mid-20th century and their impact on
discourses of development in the U.S. and in Latin America.
Dr. Minks has received grants and fellowships from the Mellon
Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research
Council, and the Fulbright Institute of International Education, among
others. Her past publications include articles in the journals Pragmatics, Language and Communication, Ethnomusicology, Yearbook for Traditional Music, and Wani, as well as chapters in several edited volumes.
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