Pedro Mateo Pedro
Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Department of Linguistics
Pedro Mateo Pedro is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Department of Linguistics and the Executive Director of the Guatemala Field Station at the University of Maryland.
A native speaker of Q’anjob’al, a Mayan language of Guatemala, Mateo Pedro’s research focuses on the documentation and description of Mayan languages, specifically language acquisition, Mayan languages in contact and dialectal variation. His documentation projects on Mayan languages have been a collaborative effort with mentors and colleagues from different universities, such as the University of Kansas, University of Maryland, McGill University, and Universidad del Valle de Guatemala.
Mateo Pedro received his PhD in linguistics at the University of Kansas in 2010 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. Mateo Pedro has taught at universities in Guatemala, Mexico and the United States and was recently a visiting scholar at the Facultad de Lenguas y Letras of the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, México. He has also taught courses on Mayan linguistics in different Mayan communities in Guatemala.
Mateo Pedro’s most recent work is on the “Acquisition of Causatives in Q’anjob’al Maya” (accepted for publication and due in 2021) in First Language and the “Acquisition of the verbal complex in Chuj” to appear in an edited volume on Chuj grammar published by the Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM).
Additionally, Mateo Pedro has worked on the production of educational materials in Mayan languages in coordination with different institutions in Guatemala, such as the Ministry of Education and the Academy of Maya Languages of Guatemala (ALMG in Spanish). In 2019, Mateo Pedro received an award as a distinguished professor at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, Campus Altiplano.