Daniel L. Everett

Daniel L. (Dan) Everett is the Trustee Professor of Cognitive Sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, MA. He holds a ScD and a Masters of Linguistics from the Universidade Estadual in Campinas (UNICAMP), both based upon years of field research among the Pirahã people of the Brazilian Amazon jungle. He taught as an instructor and later Assistant Professor at UNICAMP, 1981-1986, until leaving Brazil to return to the USA. He next was appointed full professor of linguistics and anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also chaired the Department of Linguistics until 1999. At that time, Dan moved to the Amazon to live the majority of the next three years in the jungle among the Pirahãs. He left the jungle when the University of Manchester, England, offered him the position of Professor of Phonetics and Phonology. Following several years in England, Dr. Everett spent the 2005-2006 academic year as a visiting scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He went on to chair the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Illinois State University from 2006 – 2010. From 2010-2018 he served as the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley.

Everett has lived in the Amazonian jungle for nearly eight out of the last thirty years, studying more than a dozen little or never previously studied Amazonian languages. He has published more than 100 scientific articles as sole author and eleven books. In 2008 his book, Don’t Sleep There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, was published in eight languages, becoming a best-seller in English, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean, and German. That book was selected by National Public Radio in the US as one of the best books of 2009. It was also selected by Blackwell’s booksellers in the UK as one of the best books in the UK for 2009. Everett’s newest book, Language: The Cultural Tool, was published in 2012. It has been reviewed in various publications, published in three languages, and was a NY Times Editor’s Choice. Dan has appeared numerous times on the BBC and NPR, and has been profiled in newspapers around the world. A documentary about his life and work, The Grammar of Happiness, was released in 2012. Everett’s recent books are Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious, with University of Chicago Press and How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention, with Liveright Books. Everett’s books are published in many languages.