In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:
Isaac Bleaman has just launched the Yiddish Forum (ייִדיש־פֿאָרום), a 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.
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).
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, beginning in 2026.
Congratulations to Noah Hermalin (PhD 2025), who has accepted a job as a lecturer in Stanford's Symbolic Systems Program!
An interview with Gašper Beguš was published earlier this month in The Berkeleyan!
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:
Calques is saddened to share news of the passing of Professor Emerita Robin Lakoff earlier this month. Obituaries have been shared 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 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!
Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:
In early April, Zachary O'Hagan was in Paris and Berlin in order to process archival materials from the late 1970s and early '80s related to Máíhɨ̃̀kì (Tukanoan; Peru), and to attend the annual meeting of the Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archives Network (DELAMAN). In early May, he participated in the 1st Workshop on Endangered and Minoritized Languages, hosted online by the Universidade do Minho (Portugal), giving a presentation titled "The Role of Linguistic Heritage Materials from Berkeley in California and Beyond."
At the 17th Researching and Applying Metaphor Conference in Southfield, MI, August 7-10, Eve Sweetser, Lorianne Fan (BA 2024), and Kim Grogan (University of British Columbia) will present a paper titled "Multimodal metaphor data and enrichment of corpus interpretation."
At the 17th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Buenos Aires, July 14-18, Schuyler Laparle (PhD, 2022) and Eve Sweetser will present a paper titled "Projecting viewpoint: Material and immaterial discourse anchors." Eve Sweetser will also present a paper "PANDEMIC IS WAR metaphors: Multimodal blends with varied inputs and meanings."
Larry Hyman and John Merrill (PhD, 2018) will be presenting talks at the Comparative Niger-Congo Workshop (LLACAN, Paris) on May 22-23:
The workshop website contains the program and abstracts. The workshop is free for participants and attendees. You can register to confirm your in-person attendance or to receive the Zoom link to attend online.
In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:
We wrote to our soon-to-be and very recent undergraduate alumni (fall 2024, spring and summer 2025) for updates on their plans after graduation. Here are the stories they shared with us:
Congratulations, everybody!
News from the Script Encoding Initiative:
Helena Kansa is the Program Manager of the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI). She is a recent graduate of the University of California, Irvine, and has a background in linguistics, anthropology, and foreign languages such as Italian and Arabic. In her role at SEI, Helena provides administrative and logistical support, oversees special projects like the script status database, and develops new initiatives like the upcoming SEI fieldwork fellowship. With a passion for advancing language accessibility, she is excited to assist SEI in promoting the digital representation of minority writing systems. As representative of SEI’s communications with the public, Helena hopes to cultivate new opportunities for collaboration with UC Berkeley students and the surrounding community. In her free time, she enjoys cooking, traveling, boxing, and working on her car. Helena welcomes anyone interested to reach out to her for any questions about SEI.
Please give her a warm welcome to the department. Helena is starting her role remotely, but will be around in person starting this summer. Feel free to drop by SEI's new office at Dwinelle 1224 to say hello!
Anushah Hossain (Research Director, Script Encoding Initiative) will be speaking at two public events next week:
Tuesday, May 13 – "Character Building: Bridging Code and Culture through Unicode" at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA. Event details here.
Thursday, May 15 – "The Trailblazers that Made Bangla Computing Viable" at Adobe, San Jose, CA. Event details here.
Drop by if you find yourself in the South Bay, or catch the livestreams online.
There will be several presentations by current Berkeley linguists at this year's Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) in Minneapolis, May 15-17, 2025: