Specialist of Lowland Maya cultures and languages, Valentina Vapnarsky has been carrying out fieldwork in Guatemala and Mexico since 1991. Her work focuses on regimes of temporality, agency and memory analyzed within an interactional approach of communicative practices. She has also developed comparative analysis on grammatical aspects of Amerindian languages.
Valentina Vapnarsky has directed a number of international projects, edited books/special issues and published numerous articles on these topics. She is director of the Centre de Recherche et Enseignement en Ethnologie Amérindienne (EREA) of the LESC (CNRS & UPO) and currently teaches at the University of Paris Ouest and at the INALCO (Paris).