Alum interview: Kelsey Sasaki
Kelsey Sasaki received her PhD from UC Santa Cruz in 2021. Since graduating, she has been a fellow of Jesus College at the University of Oxford. This coming fall, she will be starting a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Pomona College. The WHASC Editors recently wrote to Kelsey to ask about her academic journey since graduating.
Can you share a bit about your journey from UCSC to your current position at the University of Oxford?
My initial move from UCSC to Oxford hinged on an extremely lucky bit of timing. In the spring of 2021, I was in my sixth year and working on my dissertation, which explores various aspects of processing narrative discourse. At the same time, Daniel Altshuler was hiring a one-year, grant-funded postdoc at Oxford for a project exploring one particular aspect of processing narrative discourse (more on that below)! I was offered the position about an hour after my Zoom interview. That position was a great fit for me, not only because of the research topic, but also because Daniel gave it more of an equal collaboration dynamic than a top-down PI/postdoc one. No one would say that that fixed my confidence issues, but I can definitely say that it helped
Because that position was only for a year, I was right back on the job market upon arriving in Oxford. Working in the UK made me eligible to apply for my current position, the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. For that, I proposed a two-strand research project: one strand expands my dissertation research on multi-sentence narratives, and the other continues my work with Daniel on coherence inferences within single clauses. Now, I’m in my third and final year of the fellowship, and will soon be moving back to California to take up an assistant professor position at Pomona College.
How has your research focus evolved since you graduated from UCSC?
In my time at UCSC, I was heavily involved in the Zapotec Language Project and Nido de Lenguas. Sadly, I’ve had to set those aside since I’ve been in Oxford, but the most exciting thing about my upcoming move to Pomona is that I’ll be able to rejoin those collaborations, and hopefully start related community-engaged projects in southern California.
On the discourse front, I’ve been working extensively on clause-internal coherence, which is a phenomenon I hadn’t thought about as a student. Most work on coherence is about cross-clausal relationships, such as the causal inference that connects, “The child was drenched. She’d been hit by a big water balloon.” In my initial project with Daniel, and our subsequent ongoing collaboration with Hannah Rohde (University of Edinburgh), we’re investigating coherence inferences in single clauses like, “The drenched child got hit by a big water balloon.” So far, we have offline evidence that adjectives and nouns can contribute to clause-internal coherence. As for online evidence, it’s still early days, but we have promising evidence from the Maze task that the processing of clause-internal coherence parallels that of cross-clausal coherence.
I’ve also been working with one of my UCSC cohort-mates and academic siblings, Tom Roberts (Utrecht University) on embedded exclamatives (e.g., “Mabel imagined what a beautiful garden she would have at her new house.”). This grew out of Tom’s enduring interest in clause-embedding predicates and my frustrated—but apparently also enduring—interest in exclamatives, which began with my early graduate work on Hawai’i Creole. Changing the focus from root exclamatives to embedded ones has been illuminating, even looking only at English. We’re just about ready to enter the crosslinguistic phase of the project, which we’re both very much looking forward to.
Reflecting on your transition from graduate student to a postdoc, what were some of the challenges you faced, and how did you navigate them?
I think the biggest challenge for me was feeling isolated, especially with respect to the linguistics community here. I don’t mean that the community here is unfriendly—all the linguists I’ve met here are lovely. The challenge is meeting the other linguists in the first place, because we’re geographically dispersed amongst the various Oxford colleges. Also, due to a couple of visa-related mishaps, I missed some early opportunities to meet the other postdocs and early career people. Luckily, over the last two years the postdoc reps have organized a bunch of events for us, and I’ve been extremely glad to have a community of peers again.
Another major challenge for me was focusing entirely on research for the first time. In Santa Cruz, I always had TA responsibilities to distract me from/help me get around the impostery feelings I often get about my research. Not teaching during my first year in Oxford freed up a lot of crucial time for research and job applications, but I felt a bit unmoored without it. Since then, I’ve regularly taken on undergrad teaching, which I really enjoy, and which definitely helped me on the job market this past cycle.
What has been the most rewarding aspect of your academic career so far, particularly in terms of your research contributions?
I touched on this above, but my work with the Zapotec Language Project and Nido de Lenguas has been the most rewarding part of my career as a linguist so far. I’ve gotten to collaborate with a lot of inspiring people in the course of this work, and to do a lot of things—starting a Santiago Laxopa Zapotec dictionary, running field psycholinguistics studies, putting on community workshops—that I’m really proud of.
Returning to my discourse work, right now I’m very excited that our clause-internal coherence Maze study worked! Our offline studies suggested that speakers found those inferences weaker than their cross-clausal counterparts, and the prompts explicitly provided the interpretations of interest. Our Maze results suggest that clause-internal coherence can play a role in online processing, without us overtly drawing speakers’ attention to it.
I’m also really happy to be collaborating with another of my academic siblings, Jack Duff, along with Daniel on a project investigating potential discourse garden-path effects. He’s written to WHASC about this project, so I won’t repeat what he’s said. I will add that, in my dissertation, I noted that formal discourse theory and psycholinguistic theory historically haven’t communicated with one another very much, and did what I could at the time to at least get them in the same room together. The reward and the continuing promise of this project for me is that it makes big strides in bringing those theories together.
