Alum interview: Morwenna Hoeks

Morwenna Hoeks received her PhD in 2023, with a dissertation entitled “Comprehending focus / representing contrast”, co-advised by Professors Amanda Rysling and Maziar Toosarvandani. Since then, she has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück. Morwenna was also the recipient in 2024 of a prestigious Humboldt Research Fellowship.

The WHASC Editors recently asked Morwenna a couple questions about how postdoc life in Germany has been going:

Can you share a bit about your journey from UCSC to your current position at the University of Osnabrück? 

My journey to the University of Osnabruck started quite a while ago, in summer 2022, when a postdoc position in Prof. Dr. Nicole Gotzner’s lab was advertised. I was still working on my dissertation then, on the processing of focus and alternative sets, and I wasn’t really ready to move on just yet. But the research at this lab was very much related to my own, and would be a natural extension of the work I was doing back then, so I decided to apply anyway. Unfortunately I did not get that first position, but Nicole Gotzner decided to support me in applying for a fellowship that could still fund a position for me at the University of Osnabrück through third-party funding. This was a perfect opportunity for me, as it gave me a bit more time to wrap up my work at UCSC, and also gave me valuable experience writing grant applications like these. In summer 2023, almost exactly a year later, I therefore ended up applying to one of the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowships. The grant application ended up being successful and I will start this fellowship this summer. In the meantime,  the University of Osnabrück has already been able to fund my stay since February 2024.

So you recently received a prestigious Humboldt Fellowship—congratulations! What will that fellowship support, and how do you envision it shaping your research moving forward?

The grant allows me to stay at the Institute of Cognitive Science, at the University of Osnabrück, to work with Prof. Dr. Nicole Gotzner on the connection between focus and scalar implicature. In a nutshell, the project will basically be an extension of the line of work I started at UCSC on focus and alternative set processing, but here I will widening up the empirical terrain by comparing the alternatives involved in focus with those involved in scalar implicature. Theoretically, there are many open questions about potential differences and commonalities between the alternatives involved in the interpretation of focus and the generation of scalar implicatures, and how scales of various kinds play a role in each of them. Here, I will try to get at these questions by running a series of offline and on-line experiments that compare the processing profile of focus and scalar implicature, with the larger goal of uncovering these potential commonalities (or asymmetries) between the two phenomena. Specifically, the project will use information about the time-course of comprehenders’ reasoning about focus and SI alternatives as a window into both the semantic representations, as well as the underlying cognitive mechanisms that comprehenders use to reason about the relevant alternatives. This was exactly the kind of work I always wanted to be doing: using experimental methods to bridge the gap between semantic theory and psycholinguistics. 

Reflecting on your transition from graduate student to a postdoc, what were some of the challenges you faced, and how did you navigate them?

The transition from graduate student to postdoc has been a gradual process for me, with some notable challenges along the way. One of the initial hurdles was fully embracing the reality that I had earned my PhD—it took a little time for that accomplishment to truly resonate, and I still have a lot of imposter syndrome. Then there are inherent challenges that come with doing a postdoc: it’s another temporary stay in another country, speaking yet another language, but this time without the support of a graduate community. For me, this meant adapting to a new academic culture with an entirely new set of written and unwritten rules, which has been quite a learning experience. Navigating this has involved a bit of relying (and extending) my existing network, but mostly just asking stupid questions.

Based on your experiences, do you have any advice for current students as they prepare for the next steps in their careers?

I don’t think I have any advice that is not incredibly cheesy and current students will actually want to hear. But in the above, I think that there are two pieces of advice that are most obvious: The first one is that it has worked out well for me to start applying to things earlier rather than later—probably a bit earlier than I truly felt comfortable to. Although there were many struggles along the way and there wasn’t always necessarily a clear path forward, the fact that I bought myself so much time by starting early did really pay off in the end. The second one is the realization of how important it is to invest in the community, at UCSC and beyond. Postdoc life (and I’m sure, faculty life, too, in some cases) can be quite isolating from time to time, and as may be clear from the above, I have really missed having the UCSC Linguistics community around quite a bit. I don’t think we fully realize this as graduate students until we actually leave (at least I didn’t), but it’s quite exceptional to have so many people around to talk to on a daily basis. As a student, the amount of activities and commitments can be quite overwhelming, but right now it has been really great to have a network of UCSC alumni to draw from. So see it as an investment, and enjoy it while it lasts 🙂