Brook Hefright has extensive expertise in the areas of language and society in China; sociolinguistics; linguistic anthropology; language contact; documentation, description, and revitalization of endangered and minority languages. International affairs professional with experience managing humanitarian diplomacy and assistance programs and representing the United States in China, Russia, and the former Soviet Union, and Europe. He is a trained translator and proficient in Chinese, Russian, and German.
EDUCATION:
PhD in Linguistics, University of Michigan
MA in Linguistics, University of Michigan
BS in Foreign Service, Georgetown University
MISSION AREA:
Professional Highlights
Led research on computational methods grounded in social psychological theory to analyze public opinion and information operations in Russian and Ukrainian social media as Principal Investigator under ONR-sponsored Ukrainian and Russian Social Media project (2015-2016).
Applied fieldwork expertise to develop corpora in support of automatic speech recognition for Cantonese, Vietnamese, Lithuanian, Kazakh, Georgian, and other under-resourced languages as researcher under IARPA-sponsored BABEL Support project (2011-2016).
Coordinated refugee and migration policy across U.S. government agencies and managed $120 million in humanitarian assistance for Bangladesh and nearly $3 million for India and Nepal for more than 1.3 million beneficiaries as Program Officer in the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau for Population, Refugees, and Migration (2016-2021).
Represented the United States in Southwest China, reported on human rights and religious freedom in politically sensitive Tibet, and monitored $100,000 annual development assistance to U.S. and local NGOs as Political-Economic Officer at U.S. Consulate General Chengdu (2003-2005).
Applied fieldwork expertise to develop corpora in support of automatic speech recognition for Cantonese, Vietnamese, Lithuanian, Kazakh, Georgian, and other under-resourced languages as researcher under IARPA-sponsored BABEL Support project (2011-2016).
Coordinated refugee and migration policy across U.S. government agencies and managed $120 million in humanitarian assistance for Bangladesh and nearly $3 million for India and Nepal for more than 1.3 million beneficiaries as Program Officer in the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau for Population, Refugees, and Migration (2016-2021).
Represented the United States in Southwest China, reported on human rights and religious freedom in politically sensitive Tibet, and monitored $100,000 annual development assistance to U.S. and local NGOs as Political-Economic Officer at U.S. Consulate General Chengdu (2003-2005).
Papers
Hefright, Brook. 2012. Language contact as language ideology: The case of Putonghua and Bai. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 215. 141-158.
Michael, Erica B., Petra Bradley, Alan Mishler, Lelyn D. Saner, Brook Hefright, Ann Zeng, and Joseph H. Danks. 2018. Human use of machine translation to extract information from texts. In Isabel Lacruz & Riittä Jääskeläinen, Innovation and expansion in translation process research, Benjamins. 191-216.
Saner, Lelyn D. & Brook Hefright. 2015. Cross-cultural differences in linguistic reference tracking. In Tareq Ahram, Waldemar Karwowski & Dylan Schmorrow, Procedia Manufacturing, 6th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE 2015) and the Affiliated Conferences, Elsevier. 4022-4027. Elsevier.
Libu Lakhi, Brook Hefright & Kevin Stuart. 2007. The Namuyi: Linguistic and cultural features. Asian Folklore Studies 66. 233-253.