Lida Cope, Project Director
Lida Cope is a Professor of Applied Linguistics at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, where she has taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in linguistics, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and TESOL since 2000; and an External Research Associate with the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. A native of the Czech Republic, she has academic degrees from Palacký University (Olomouc, Czech Republic) and the University of Arizona. Her research interests include Texas Czech; immigrant/heritage community language documentation, revitalization and maintenance; language and ethnic identity; child bilingualism; language contact and first language attrition; and cross-cultural communication. She has written on the language, culture, and ethnicity in historically Czech Moravian communities in Texas. Since her fieldwork in Texas in 1997, she has maintained strong ties with the Texas Czech community, and with scholars at the Briscoe Center, the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University at College Station. She is dedicated to the success of The Texas Czech Legacy Project for which she believes the University of Texas at Austin, the heart of the historically Czech Texas, is the most appropriate location. She is fortunate to have support from her home department at East Carolina University in this effort. Email: copel@ecu.edu
Ryan S. Miller, Web Developer
Ryan Miller is a web developer from Austin, Texas. He made his first website at the age of 13 and has been developing on the web ever since. Passionate about history and its importance, Ryan is pleased to be a part of developing Texas Czech Legacy Archive and helping to document the endangered Texas Czech dialect. He studied government and computer science at UT-Austin. Email: s.ryan.miller@gmail.com
Alžběta Vítková, Segmenting and Transcription
Alžběta Vítková studies French Philology and Hispanic Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Area Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague. She has been interested in corpus linguistics since high school and currently participates in the project building a corpus of spoken Czech at the Institute of the Czech National Corpus in Prague. She considers the Texas Czech Legacy Project to be a perfect opportunity to combine her love for Czech and her research interests in expatriation, international affairs, and teaching languages. She's been involved with the Project since January 2017. Email: alzbeta.vitkova@gmail.com
Lucie Salzmannová, Transcription
Lucie Salzmannová is currently a student at Charles University in Prague, where she has been studying German for Multicultural Communication: interpreting and translation and General Linguistics on the Faculty of Arts and Law on the Faculty of Law. She is interested in studying languages and possesses advanced certificates in English and German. She's been transcribing for the Texas Czech Legacy Project since January 2017. Email: SalzmannovaLucie@seznam.cz
Lenka Vaněčková, Transcription
Lenka Vaněčková is a student at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. She has a Bachelor’s in Deaf Studies and is currently completing her Master‘s in Teaching Czech as a Foreign Language. She's been teaching Czech as a foreign language in Prague. She did transcription work for the Texas Czech Legacy Project in 2017-2018. Email: lenka.vane@seznam.cz
Hans C. Boas, Project Advisor
Hans Boas is a professor for Germanic Linguistics in the Department of Germanic Studies and the Department of Linguistics, and Director of the Texas German Dialect Project at the University of Texas at Austin. A native of Germany, he studied law and linguistics at the Georg-August- Universität Göttingen, Germany. He received both his M.A. (thesis: The Passive in German) and his Ph.D. (dissertation: Resultative Constructions in English and German) in the Linguistic Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His main research areas are syntax, semantics, computational linguistics, and language contact and language death. Email: hcb@austin.utexas.edu
Mary Neuburger, Project Advisor
Mary Neuburger is the Chair of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, the sponsoring department for the Texas Czech Legacy Project at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her PhD in history at the University of Washington in 1997, with a specialty in Southeastern Europe. She is currently a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas, as well as Director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. She is the author of two books The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria and Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria 1856-1989. She is co-editor, with Paulina Bren, of Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe. Email: burgerm@austin.utexas.edu
Mark Hopkins, Segmenting and Transcription
Mark Hopkins holds a PhD in Slavic language pedagogy from the University of Texas at Austin, where he also worked as an instructor of Czech until 2016. His research interests include Czech and Russian studies, second language vocabulary acquisition, music and video in language education, and the language and culture of the Texas Czechs. Funded by the Endowment for Czech Studies, UT-Austin, Mark Hopkins began working with Lida Cope and Veronika Tuckerová processing the TCLP data in spring 2013. He led the project transcription work through spring 2016. Email: markhopkins81@gmail.com
John Tomeček, Project Consultant
John is a native Texas Czech. In August 2006, he initiated a campaign to start the Texas Czech Dialect Project under the motto "Náš jazyk, naše dědictvi, naše povinnost". The project began with a sole focus on language preservation, but has gradually morphed into a documentation project on all aspects of Texas Czech culture and language. John pursued this work through his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Texas at Austin. He amassed many hours of his own interviews with speakers of Texas Czech and took charge to begin digitizing the then-deteriorating interview collection of Svatava Pirková Jakobson. In 2011, he left to pursue other research interests, turning over his work and recordings to Lida Cope. John serves the Texas Czech Legacy Project Consultant. Email: tomecek@tamu.edu