Academic Advisors

Gabrielle Vail holds research positions in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and with the Script Encoding Initiative at UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Tulane University in 1996. Vail’s research focuses on Postclassic Maya cultures as documented in the screenfold Maya codices, and on weaving and textile production in Maya communities today. She has received several NEH grants in support of her digital humanities research, which led to the creation of the online Maya Codices Database, and is currently collaborating on the development of a font for Maya hieroglyphs. She is the author of five books, including most recently Códice de Dresde, and is the co-editor of three others, with another forthcoming. She leads workshops on the Maya codices and on integrating Western and Indigenous ways of knowing for educators, students, and community groups throughout the U.S. and Latin America and is involved in cultural heritage programs based in Yucatán and Ecuador. She collaborated on several projects with George Stuart beginning in 2008 and has been affiliated with BEARC in a variety of capacities (Publications Committee, Collections Committee, and as a visiting researcher and consultant) since then. She is currently the Head Advisor of Collections.