“If humans do it, anthropologists can study it” is the life motto of Professor and Chair of Anthropology Alice Pomponio.  A “global” scholar, Pomponio has studied and published on linguistics, psychological anthropology, and the anthropology of religion, sex and gender, education and culture in Papua New Guinea, Africa and Italy. The author of two books, she is engaged, with a student research assistant, in “a very long-term project to write an encyclopedic dictionary and grammar of an endangered Austronesian language from the Siassi Islands region of Papua New Guinea.

“It will probably be the magnum opus of my career,” she explains, “because the data span more than 100 years of language and cultural change in a remote region of northeast New Guinea, about which very little (read ‘nothing’) has been published about its language, and none of it available to the people who speak it.  My encyclopedic dictionary and grammar is going to be user-friendly, accessible and above all useful to the people who need it most, the Siassi Islanders and their children.

“I like knowing my students’ names, and knowing them as real people, not numbers,” says Pomponio. She most enjoys “That ‘Aha!’ moment, when a student finally ‘gets it,’ whether ‘it’ happens to be a complex theory, a focus for a research project, a decision about graduate school, the Peace Corps or a career path, or a fiddly bit of grammar in a paper.  It is a truly magical moment.”

Outside of work, Pomponio describes herself as “a devoted student of classical and flamenco guitar.” She enjoys walking, swimming and cross-country skiing. She also writes children's picture books based on her scholarly work in Papua New Guinea, “to increase the audience interested in other cultures and to do so accurately.”  Travel is also a pleasure as well as part of her work; she is making plans for trips to Australia, Papua New Guinea to finish the dictionary, and Italy to teach at the University of Siena and study the ethno-history of the Palio during an upcoming sabbatical.