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Lenore A. Grenoble

Lenore is the Carl Darling Buck Professor of Linguistics and Slavic Linguistics at the University of Chicago. She specializes in language contact and endangerment, language loss and revitalization. Her work focuses on the study of Slavic and Arctic Indigenous languages: she conducts fieldwork on Evenki, an endangered language spoken by nomadic reindeer herders in Siberia, and Kalaallisut, an Inuit language spoken in Greenland. A large part of the work in Greenland involves collaboration with colleagues at the Greenland Language Secretariat, to create a Kalaallisut-English dictionary. She also conducts fieldwork on Wolof, a language of wider communication in Senegal.

Lenore is deeply committed to collaboration with indigenous peoples and to the linguistic documentation of endangered languages. To that end, she is currently working for the Inuit Circumpolar Council, Canada, on a project sponsored by the Arctic Council to assess and promote the vitality of Arctic indigenous languages.

After graduating Cornell as a Russian major, Lenore went to graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley where she received a PhD in Slavic Linguistics in 1986. She was hired by Dartmouth College and taught there until 2007 when she left to join Chicago. While at Dartmouth, she also served as Associate Dean of the Humanities and continues to hold a position there as a Research Fellow in the Institute of Arctic Studies.

At Dartmouth she met and married her husband, Jay Lawrence (Cornell PhD Physics ‘70). Lenore has deep connections to Cornell: her parents Maurice and Margaret Grenoble are Class of ‘53; her daughter Sarah Kopper is Class of ‘10; and her niece, Amanda Moore, is currently a PhD student at Weill Cornell Medical College. Her niece Kim Bostwick is Class of ‘92 and worked for over ten years as Curator of Birds and Mammals in Cornell’s Museum of Vertebrates.