I am an Associate Professor of Anthropology for the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Metropolitan State University of Denver. I earned my PhD in Linguistics with a certificate in Culture, Language, and Social Practice from the University of Colorado Boulder. As a linguistic anthropologist and educator, I focus on multimodal forms of linguistic expression and discourse. I do so from a variety of perspectives – sociocultural, interactional, historical – and always with an eye to how language intersects with other areas of meaning making (e.g., symbolic art, design, mathematics). As such, I engage with many sub- and allied fields of linguistic anthropology, including discourse analysis, gesture studies, and epigraphy.

My research specifically involves Hand Talk and other traditional signed-language practices of Indigenous America, focusing on how sign-based and speech-based elements are combined within linguistically coherent expressions. I am currently examining this linguistic bimodalism within Ancient Maya texts, where (speech-based) hieroglyphs are accompanied by textual hand signs (which are held by depicted figures). In Sandoval (2025), I spearheaded the initial decipherment of these Ancient Maya hand signs and demonstrated how the hieroglyphic script and hand-sign script are textually integrated components of a beautifully complex Mayan scribal tradition. My previous work focused on describing the sign-speech linguistic bimodalism of Arapaho (an Algonquian language of North America’s Great Plains).

Decipherment of Ancient Maya Textual Hand Signs

Decipherment of Ancient Maya Textual Hand Signs

Research Article

Public Scholarship

Select Media Coverage / Interviews