Carolyn Vieira-Martinez

Assistant Professor of History; 2005
vieira@chapman.edu

B.A., Oakland University; M.A., Michigan State University; Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles

Carolyn Vieira-Martinez is an assistant professor of History. Dr. Vieira-Martinez joined the History Department in 2005 as a specialist in Central African History and African Languages.  Her dissertation entitled "Building Kumbundu," combined historical linguistics methodology with GIS technology to study the social history of central Angola and the construction of community through language.  Dr. Vieira-Martinez has received several prestigious awards to support her research, including the Chancellor's Dissertation Fellowship from UCLA, as well as grants from the Fulbright Scholarship Board, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the national archives of Portugal, and the National African Languages Resource Center. 

Dr. Vieira-Martinez is editor for H-Luso Africa , the official discussion list initiated by the professional association, LASO (Lusophone African Studies Organization).  She has taught computer mediated instruction methods and qualitative data analysis at universities including the University of San Diego and the University of Texas, Houston.  Her ASILI African Scholarly Integrated Language Inquiry database system is used by scholars to facilitate cooperative interdisciplinary research with Bantu language evidence.

Dr. Vieira-Martinez conducts her research using remarkable variety of languages including Spanish, Portuguese, Swahili, Kimbundu, Kikongo, Umbundu, Yaka, Holo, German, Latin, Italian and English.  Her research has been presented at the 2002 "Kiswahili Language, Literature and Modern Thought" conference, University Nairobi, at the "African Urban Spaces, History and Culture" conference, University of Texas, Austina, and at the annual African Studies Association conferences in 2002 and 2004.  She is a contributing author to the Encyclcopedia of Latin American History and Culture and is currently working on a publication illustrating the use of Bantu vocabulary to reconstruct histories of gendered leadership in Central Africa.  Her research in Chicano and African Histories continues to explore the unique features of social history in multilingual communities.

At Chapman University, Dr. Vieira-Martinez teaches Modern and Ancient African History, Chicano History, Central African History, and Freshman Foundations.  She is also developing a series of courses on topics in African History including the study of Leadership, Slavery, and Language and Space in the past. 

Dr Vieira-Martinez' publications.

"Building Kimbundu: Language community reconsidered in west central Africa, c. 1500-1750." Ph.D. diss., University of California Los Angeles, 2006.

Vieira-Martinez, C. & Thomas Hinnebusch.  African Scholarly Integrated Language Inquiry (ASILI) software and database, version 11082009.  Available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license, 2009.

“The African City.” Review of The African City: A History, by Bill Freund.  Journal of World History 21, n. 1 (March 2010).

“Break the Whip.”  Tim Robbins, director.  (Los Angeles, CA: The Actors Gang, 2010).

“Spoken Like a Market Woman: Learning Language in Malanje.” Paper presentation at African Studies Association, San Francisco, CA, November 2010.

“War in Pre-Colonial Eastern Africa.” Review of War in Pre-Colonial Eastern Africa: The Patterns and Meanings of State-level Conflict in the Nineteenth Century, by Richard Reid.  The Historian, (forthcoming).

“Imagining Community: Introducing African History with Geographic Information Systems” in Teaching Africa in the Twentieth Century Classroom, Brandon Lundy, ed.  (forthcoming).