| | | Name: | Dr. Victoria Reifler Bricker | | | Institution: | Tulane University | | | Year Elected: | 2002 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1940 | | | | | | |
Victoria R. Bricker received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1968. She joined the faculty of Tulane University in 1969 and became professor emerita of anthropology in 2006. Dr. Bricker's brilliant research has focused on the cultural and linguistic structure of the Maya, ancient and contemporary, with path-breaking studies of three domains: the forms of ritual humor found in modern Mayan cultures (1973); comparative analysis of Mayan insurrections against Spanish rule during the colonial and modern periods (1981); and the grammar of Mayan hieroglyphs (1986). More recently, she has focused her research on the hieroglyphs and iconography found in the Mayan codices - painted bark-cloth books - (1992), and she is now universally recognized as a preeminent world authority in this scholarly field. Dr. Bricker was been the series editor of the Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians between 1977 and 2007. She was an editor for the American Ethnologist (1973-76) and book review editor of the American Anthropologist (1971-73). She is the author of Ritual Humor in Highland Chiapas (1973); The Indian Christ, the Indian King: The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual (1981); A Grammar of Maya Hieroglyphs (1986); Papers on the Madrid Codex (1997; (with Eleuterio Po’ot Yah and Ofelia Dzul de Po’ot) A Dictionary of the Mayan Language as Spoken in Hocaba, Yucatan (1998); (with H. Bricker) "Zodiacal References in the Maya Codices," in The Sky in Mayan Literature (1992); "Color and texture in the Maya language of Yucatan," in Anthropological Linguistics (1999); (with Helga Maria Miram) "An Encounter of Two Worlds: The Book of Chilam Balam of Kaua (2002), and (with Harvey Bricker) Astronomy in the Maya Codices (2011) and Lunar Calendars of the Pre-Columbian Maya (2020); Transformational Journeys: An Ethnologist’s Memoir (2017) and A Historical Grammar of the Maya Language of Yucatan, 1557-2000 (2018). Victoria and Harvey Bricker are the 2011 recipients of the American Philosophical Society's John Frederick Lewis Award for Astronomy in the Maya Codices. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Anthropological Association, serving on its executive board from 1980-83. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2002. | |
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