WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Alum Nick LaCara (BA 2008, MA 2010) will be beginning next year as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. Nick received his PhD in Linguistics in 2016 from UMass Amherst, where he is currently a lecturer. He will be joined at UofT by new faculty member and UCSC alum Nathan Sanders. Best of luck, Nick!
Congratulations to alum Shayne Sloggett (B.A. 2010, Honors), who this fall will be Postdoctoral Fellow in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Northwestern University. Shayne began his psycholinguistic career as an R.A. in the language processing lab at Santa Cruz, and after a stint as a Baggett R.A. at Maryland, joined the Ph.D. program at UMass Amherst. There he is completing a dissertation entitled “When errors aren’t: How comprehendhers selectively violate binding theory ” supervised by Prof. Brian Dillon.
This fall, alumnus Aaron Steven White (BA, 2009) will begin as a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the University of Rochester in the Department of Linguistics and the Goergen Institute for Data Science, with secondary appointments in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Aaron received his PhD from the University of Maryland in 2015, and has since been a postdoctoral fellow in the Johns Hopkins Science of Learning Institute where he’s been working with Benjamin Van Durme and UCSC PhD alum Kyle Rawlins. Congratulations, Aaron!
On Saturday, March 18th, the department hosted Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC), which was a resounding success, featuring talks on linguistic topics of all shapes and sizes on languages both near and far. The day of talks by second- and third-years was rounded out by distinguished UCSC alumnus Kyle Rawlins’s talk on “Unary ‘or'”. The evening was then capped off with a feast and commensurate levels of merrymaking at the Cowell Provost House. Thanks to everyone who helped make LASC happen–in particular, Lisa Hofmann, our LASC paparazzo, who provided us with this photo of the LASC presenters:
Back row: Matt Wagers (LING 290 instructor), Margaret Kroll, Tom Roberts, Steven Foley, Jed Pizarro-Guevara, Jake Vincent
Front row: Hitomi Hirayama, Lauren McGarry, Kelsey Sasaki, Kyle Rawlins
This just in from Elliott Callahan (B.A. in Linguistics with honors, 2007), who has been in medical school at UCSF:
“I can’t believe it’s been almost 5 years since I applied to medical school! Needless to say, the time has flown by….[and now] I’ve matched for anesthesia residency at UCSF (so I will be staying for another 4 years). It’s a very good program, so I could not be happier. I still fondly remember my time at UCSC, and still try to work linguistics into life whenever I can (although doctors generally fail to appreciate that “vasa previa” is plural, or that aspiration really means the opposite of what they think). However, I did manage to do a brief project transcribing/translating/glossing a story in St’át’imcets, which I was super excited about.”
Mark your calendars for this year’s edition of Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC), the annual UCSC linguistics research conference at which second- and third-year graduate students present their research. The all-day event will take place on Saturday, March 18th, in Hum 1, Room 210. Eight talks are on the slate this year, covering a diverse range of subfields, including syntax, semantics, pragmatics, morphophonology, psycholinguistics, and numerous combinations therein, and spanning such languages as English, Cebuano, Georgian, Estonian, Chamorro, Hawai’i Creole, and Japanese. This year’s Distinguished Alumnus Lecture be given by Kyle Rawlins (Johns Hopkins), entitled “Unary ‘or'”. The full program can be found here. Don’t miss it!
Congratulations go to Nathan Sanders (PhD ’03), who will be starting a new job as an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Toronto later this year! Nathan had this to say about the news:
Starting this summer, I will start a new chapter in my career by joining the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream. The position allows me to focus on my strengths in undergraduate teaching and curriculum design, but I’ll also be able to do research with some amazing colleagues in one of the top linguistics programs in the world. I’ll continue my research in sign language phonetics (check out my article “A cross-linguistic preference for torso stability in the lexicon: Evidence from 24 sign languages” with Donna Jo Napoli, due out in Sign Language & Linguistics this month), and I expect to finish the first draft of my phonetics and phonology textbook with Oxford University Press later this year.