In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:
Isaac Bleaman has launched the Yiddish Forum (ייִדיש־פֿאָרום), a new working group of the Townsend Center for the Humanities. Meetings are conducted in Yiddish and take place every other Thursday at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life. For more information, please visit the Yiddish Forum webpage.
Nicole Holliday was included in a story in The Berkeleyan about a survey course on "Openness to Opposing Views."
An interview with Gašper Beguš was published earlier this month in The Berkeleyan!
Congratulations to Noah Hermalin (PhD 2025), who has accepted a job as a lecturer in Stanford's Symbolic Systems Program!
Congratulations to Isaac Bleaman, who was recently promoted to Associate Professor with tenure!
Separately, Bleaman was also appointed to the Herman P. and Sophia Taubman II Chair in Jewish Studies, effective in 2026.
Andrew Garrett's book The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California (2023) was reviewed in History of Humanities 10 (2025) 281-284 (by James McElvenny, here) and in Language 101 (2025) 406-410 (by Margaret Thomas, here).
Calques is saddened to share news of the passing of Professor Emerita Robin Lakoff earlier this month. Obituaries have been posted on the UC Berkeley Letters & Science website, on the Linguistic Society of America website, and in the New York Times. A departmental memorial will be held on November 2.
Congratulations to Allegra Robertson Molinaro, who successfully defended her dissertation on "Laryngeal features and segmental length: Case studies in Yanesha, Barese, Maranese, and Italian" on May 19. Her committee included Hannah Sande (chair), Darya Kavitskaya, and Justin Davidson.
A photo of Allegra with two of her committee members is attached.
Congratulations to Amy Rose Deal and Justin Royer (former Berkeley postdoc, now at Université de Montréal), who have a new Open Access article out on "Mayan animacy hierarchy effects and the dynamics of Agree" in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory!