Interdisciplinary Studies

Current Position:
Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Hawai'i

Contacts:
Krauss Hall 116, University of Hawai'i, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA; (808) 956-3294; <drechsel@hawaii.edu>

Education:
Maturität, Arts and Sciences, Realgymnasium Basel (Switzerland), March 1969
M.A., Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, May 1974
M.A., Linguistics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, May 1976
Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, May 1979

Areas of Academic Interest:
Pidgin and creole studies, historical sociolinguistics, and ethnohistory with focus on North America and the Pacific; history of linguistics, anthropology, and the social sciences; European and world history; peace studies

Selected Recent Publications:
"Native American Contact Languages of the Contiguous United States." In: Stephen A. Wurm, Peter Mühlhäusler, and Darrell T. Tryon (eds.), Atlas of Languages of Intercultural Communication in the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996, pp. 1213-1239 and Map 128

"An Integrated Vocabulary of Mobilian Jargon, a Native American Pidgin of the Mississippi Valley." In: Anthropological Linguistics 38 (2):248-354, 1996

Mobilian Jargon: Linguistic and Sociohistorical Aspects of a Native American Pidgin. Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1997

"Language Contact in the Early Colonial Pacific: Evidence for a Maritime Polynesian Jargon or Pidgin." In: John H. Rickford and Suzanne Romaine (eds.), Creole Genesis, Attitudes and Discourse. Studies Celebrating Charlene J. Sato. (Creole Language Library 20.) Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999, pp. 71-96

"Sociolinguistic-Ethnohistorical Observations on Maritime Polynesian Pidgin in Herman Melville's Two Major Semi-Autobiographical Novels of the Pacific" (Manuscript, available upon request)

"Sociolinguistic-Ethnohistorical Observations on 'Pidgin English' in Herman Melville's Two Major Semi-Autobiographical Novels of the Pacific" (Manuscript, available upon request)

"'Native Hawaiians Are Not Native Americans, But ...': Contrastive Observations on Native Hawaiian Recognition" (Manuscript, available upon request)

Current Research:
Philological and ethnohistorical research on Pidgin Polynesian of the19th-century Pacific