This workshop brings together a cohort of Indigenous scholars from Guatemala and Mexico who are all native speakers and researchers of literature in a Mayan language with faculty and researchers from Princeton and other U.S. institutions.  

Among the Indigenous researchers are Ajpub' Pablo García Ixmatá (Tz'utujil Maya) and Saqijix López Ixcoy (K'iche' Maya) from the Universidad Rafael Landívar in Guatemala City and María Beatriz Par Sapón (K'iche' Maya) from the Fundación Proyecto Lingüístico Francisco Marroquín in Antigua, Guatemala.  Professors Allison Bigalow (Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese), Eve Danziger (Department of Anthropology), and Rafael Alvarado (Department of Data Science) will join from the University of Virginia. 

Together with Princeton University Library Special Collections staff and faculty from various disciplines, the group will collaboratively engage with Princeton University Library’s Mesoamerican manuscript collection. Princeton’s is among the largest collections of original 16th-18th-century manuscripts written in native Mesoamerican languages by Indigenous authors, scribes, and/or Spanish missionaries familiar with those languages.

Special Collections has worked diligently to make these manuscripts and other texts available online as IIIF images (freely downloadable, fully color, high-resolution scans) for research in fields including socio-political ethnohistory, historical linguistics, history of Native religion and engagements with Christianity, musicology, art history, postcolonial studies, to name a few. However, examining objects directly, with attention to their materiality and a critical understanding of their provenance, conservation, cataloging, and history, is invaluable.

The workshop will explore future collaborative research projects including critical transcriptions and translations, ethnohistorical and intertextual analysis, and corrections of the catalogued record, with the increased involvement of Maya scholars in the digital humanities.