Dwyer conducts research into the languages and cultures of Inner and Central Asia, especially languages in the Turkic, Sinitic, and Mongolicfamilies. She earned her PhD in 1996 in Altaic and Chinese Linguistics at the University of Washington,[3] and was a Humboldt postdoctoral research fellow and Volkswagen-DOBES grantee at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. She has also published pedagogical and linguistic materials for the Uyghur language.[4]
Since 2010, her collaborative work has focused on sharing analyzed language resources, including a pilot website Interactive Inner Asia,[11] which provided some samples of language materials based on Dwyer's VW-DOBES project, and the Uyghur 2.0 website,[12] which includes the Uyghur Light Verbs project (on the diachrony of modern Uyghur complex predicates), and the Analyzing Turki Manuscripts Online (ATMO) project (creating digital editions of late eastern Chaghatay/early modern Uyghur language texts, with a focus on cultural and linguistic analysis of medical manuscripts, and social network analysis).
Dwyer, Arienne M. (2007). Salar: a study in Inner Asian areal contact processes, Part I: Phonology. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. ISBN9783447040914.
Harrison, K. David; Rood, David; Dwyer, Arienne M. (2008). Lessons from Documented Endangered Languages. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN9789027229908.
Dwyer, Arienne M.; Lloyd-Smith, Lindsay; Oths, Kathryn; Perry, George H. (10 June 2016). Femenías, Blenda (ed.). "General Principles and Practices of Digital Data Management"(PDF). Bringing Digital Data Management Training into Methods Courses for Anthropology. American Anthropological Association.