Becky Jarvis, Tzintia Montaño Ramírez, and Zachary O'Hagan are in Berlin this week giving presentations and posters at Language Documentation and Archiving at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (pictured here with organizing committee member Kelsey Neely, PhD 2019; Amalia Skilton, PhD 2019; and Bernat Bardagil, postdoc 2018-2020).
A new volume of papers on language documention edited by Berkeley linguistics faculty members Peter Jenks and Lev Michael includes a paper by
Two (former) Berkeley affiliates presented at the International Conference on Historical Linguistics at Heidelberg University. Johanna Nichols presented on "Reconstructing prehistoric sociolinguistics from modern grammatical evidence" and Anna Berge (PhD 1997, now a professor at the University of
Congrats to Tessa Scott on her dissertation Pronouns and agreement in San Juan Atitán Mam, filed in May! Tessa has accepted a position as a postdoctoral fellow with the UC Berkeley Future of Higher Education Postdoctoral Fellowship Program starting in September. She will be working in the office of the Dean of the College of Letters and Science on undergraduate education policy and advising. In this position she will also continue her research and work on Mam.
We wrote to our soon-to-be and very recent undergraduate alumni (fall 2022, spring and summer 2023) for updates on their plans after graduation. Here are the stories they shared with us:
Congratulations, everybody!
Congratulations to Andrew Cheng (PhD 2020) who has accepted a tenure track offer from the University of Hawai'i to start in August 2023! Andrew also has a new paper out in the Journal of Linguistic Geography titled "A comparative study of English vowel shift and vowel space area among Korean Americans in three dialect regions."
Congratulations to Nik Rolle (PhD 2018), mom Amy, and big brother Jude on the birth of Grace Elisabeth Deverell on October 7.
We wrote to our soon-to-be and recent undergraduate alumni (from 2022 and 2021) for updates on their plans after graduation. Here are the stories they shared with us:
Congratulations, everybody!
Congrats to Julia Nee (PhD 2021), along with coauthors Genevieve Smith, Alicia Sheares, and Ishita Rustagi, on the publication of a new article titled "Linguistic justice as a framework for designing, developing, and managing natural language processing tools" in Big Data and Society! There's a blog post summary of the article here.
Calques is happy to pass along the following update from Keith Johnson and Sharon Inkelas:
Congratulations to Meg Cychosz (PhD 2020) who has just accepted a tenure-track appointment in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA!
Congratulations to Fey Parrill (BA 2000 with linguistics dept. honors; co-founder of the Berkeley Gesture and Multimodality Group), who has been promoted to Full Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University!
Congratulations to Alice Shen (PhD 2020), who has accepted a position as a computational linguist at Grammarly!
Congrats to Zachary O'Hagan, who became an associated member of the Instituto Riva-Agüero in Lima, part of the research group Amazonía indígena contemporánea: Relaciones interétnicas, lenguas e historia with anthropologists Emanuele Fabiano and Joshua Homan.
Alejandro Granados Vargas (BA 2013) was admitted into the PhD program in Education, with an emphasis on Human Development in Context, at UC Irvine. His research area will be in bilingual language development in language impaired children. Congratulations, Alejandro!
Matt Faytak (PhD 2018) reports that, after a 2 year post-doc/lecturer position at UCLA, he has accepted a position as an Assistant Professor at SUNY Buffalo, and will start this August. Congrats, Matt!
Calques is saddened to report the passing of colleague and Berkeley Linguistics PhD alumnus Tucker Childs. We are forwarding the announcement sent out to students in Applied Linguistics at Portland State:
With heavy hearts, we are writing to tell you that Professor Tucker Childs passed away yesterday, January 26, 2021. As many of you know, he was admitted to the hospital at the beginning of January. Unfortunately, Tucker was not able to overcome the complications of legionella. He passed away peacefully with his wife and daughter at his side.
If you would like to offer Tucker's family your condolences or help celebrate Tucker's life by sharing a fond memory of your time with him , please visit his memorial page: https://www.inmemori.com/tchilds-u42cg
We will be in touch about memorial events for the department community soon. Even before that, please don't hesitate to reach out to each other and to faculty as we all grieve the loss of our professor, mentor, and colleague. This sad time is even harder since we can't come together physically, but we can still be a community. [...]
In lieu of sending flowers, please consider donating to the Sherbro Foundation—a non-profit dear to Tucker, which empowers rural Sierra Leone through education and agriculture development. Tucker was also a great supporter of the Nattinger Scholarship in our department. You can make a donation in his memory through the PSU Foundation.
Our hearts go out to Tucker's family and to all who knew Tucker. He will be greatly missed.
The Faculty and Staff of Applied Linguistics
Congratulations to Amalia Skilton (PhD, 2019), who will begin a 3-year Klarman Fellowship at Cornell University in July 2021. Klarman Fellowships "provide postdoctoral opportunities to early-career scholars of outstanding talent, initiative and promise. Among the most selective of its kind in the country, the program offers independence from constraints of particular grants, enabling the recipients to devote themselves to frontline, innovative research without being tied to specific outcomes or teaching responsibilities."
Congratulations to Amalia Skilton (PhD, 2019), who has been awarded the SSILA Archiving Award in Honor of Michael Krauss! From the official announcement:
The committee recognizes the Ticuna Archive, assembled and archived by Amalia and housed at the Survey of California and other Indian Languages. The archive stands out not only for the breadth of materials which it contains, but also for its meticulous organization and curation, which are documented in the guide to the materials, and published in Language Documentation and Conservation. In addition, the committee particularly notes the level of community-engagement exemplified by Amalia’s discussion of ethics and permissions associated with the collections and the level of accessibility of the collection. Amalia lives up to the spirit of Michael Krauss in creating high standards for documentation and archiving and at the same time as contributing to linguistic theory through her research on such topics as deixis, language acquisition, and Ticuna grammar.