FORMER LRC VISITORS DEFEND DISSERTATIONS IN EUROPE

Karen De Clercq and Violeta Martínez-Paricio were both LRC visitors at UCSC in the academic year 2011-2012. Both laid down solid roots in the department and contributed a lot to the life of the department while they were here. Both defended their doctoral dissertations in December (at the University of Ghent in Belgium and at the University of Tromsø in Norway respectively) and both had UCSC faculty members as external members of their dissertation committees.

Karen’s dissertation was on A Unified Syntax of Negation and the defense took place in Ghent on December 13th. The external examiners were Jim McCloskey and and Michal Starke of CASTL, the linguistics research center at Tromsø. There are some pictures of the event here. Violeta’s defense took place at Tromsø on December 11th and the two “opponents” were Junko Ito and Birget Alber of the University of Verona. The social events following the intellectual work of the defense (and a workshop on the following day) gave Junko and Armin a chance to reconnect with former LRC visitor Ove Lorentz and with alumnus Peter Svenonius, who is now director of CASTL. Go here for the picture. Johan Brandtler, who was an LRC visitor at the same time as Karen and Violeta, was also present for Karen’s defense.