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 artistic, design-oriented, mathematic). 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 initiated the 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).