We welcome nine new graduate students to the department this year.
Ben Mericli comes to UCSC Linguistics from Washington, D.C., where lived and worked for five years after college. Ben studied linguistics, philosophy, and engineering physics at the University of Pittsburgh. He plans to concentrate on morphology and syntax at UCSC and, although his D.C.-based band has been disbanded, hopes to continue to write and play music as linguistics permits.
Chelsea Miller is entering her first year as an MA student but has been on the campus for 4 years having completed her BA in Linguistics here at UCSC in 2014; she looks forward to continuing to study linguistics here. With regard to linguistic research, her interests include syntax and psycholinguistics, and more specifically within these areas, ellipsis, ellipsis resolution, parsing, and memory. In her “free time”, she is probably still thinking about linguistics, but also enjoys taking dance classes, cooking, walking, hiking, and biking (though it’s a must stop to pet all cats on the way).
Hitomi Hirayama comes from Japan, and completed her BA and MA at the University of Tokyo. She is interested in the semantics of noun phrases, information structure, and also in the Romance languages. She is seriously missing udon noodles in Japan, but is nevertheless enjoying her new life in California with two cute cats.
Jed Guevara got his BA in Linguistics and French from UC Berkeley back in 2010. He then went to CSU Long Beach to get his MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. He did a brief stint as an ESL teacher in Long Beach but decided to go back to school. He plans to focus on the acquisition and processing of syntactic dependencies in Tagalog and other Philippine languages. When he is not doing linguistics, he enjoys cooking with wine (and adding some to the food as well), and/or playing boardgames.
Jeff Adler is from New Jersey. He did his undergrad degree at Rutgers, and then lived in Colombia for a year. Intellectually, he swings p-side, and is interested mostly in everything phonological theory (especially OT), with additional interests in phonetics and syntax. Outside of linguistics, he likes hiking and other endeavors into nature, as well as reading and buying new clothes.
Margaret Kroll found linguistics relatively late, after a (short) career working in politics. She was for the past two years in the linguistics PhD program at UCLA, but is very happy to have moved to Santa Cruz. Her linguistic interests are in pragmatics, semantics, and philosophy of language, in particular issues at the semantics/pragmatics interface. Her non-linguistic interests include running, politics, and, at the moment, teaching herself to sew.
Maxwell Sowell is originally from San Diego, and received his BA in Linguistics and Philosophy at UC Davis. He enjoys working with semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. In his free time he likes to drum (let’s jam or start a band!) and drag his friends out to be social. Long road trips are rad.
Nate Clair is a Utah native, whose two loves in life are languages and the outdoors. Nate did his undergrad work at the University of Utah where he studied Linguistics and Middle East studies. He loves Indo-Iranian languages in particular and focuses his research on their syntax and semantics. When not employed in linguistic matters, he is an avid runner, hiker and cross-country skier.
Steven Foley comes to Santa Cruz by way of New York City, so he’s thrilled to experience genuine nature but misses good bagels. Morphosyntax, ergativity, and Caucasian languages are major interests of his, as are cooking and at least moderately artsy movies.