ALRENGA JOINS UMASS
Congratulations to Ph.D. alum Peter Alrenga, who is joining the faculty at UMass Amherst as a Visiting Professor this year! Read more about his research and appointment here.
Category: Alumni News
POLIĆ RECEIVES OUTSTANDING STAFF AWARD
This year’s UCSC Outstanding Staff Award goes to Irena Polić, managing director of UCSC’s Institute for Humanities Research. Irena has long been a major part of our department, both as a student (BA 2001, MA 2003) and for her countless hours of work connecting linguists to the many opportunities afforded by the IHR, which supports much of the work done by students and faculty alike. Read more about Irena’s journey, and why she believes the humanities still play a vitally important role in our society, here.
EXCITING NEWS FROM ALUMS ADAM & ANDY
PhD alums Andy Wedel and Adam Ussishkin are thrilled to share the news with their Santa Cruz friends that their son Aldo was born on May 16, weighing in at 6 pounds 11.5 ounces. No word yet on his phonological inventory acquisition.
RAWLINS TENURED AT JHU
Alum Kyle Rawlins was recently promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at Johns Hopkins University. Congratulations, Kyle!
ANAND AT SALT
This past weekend, Pranav Anand was at the University of Maryland for the 27th edition of Semantics and Linguistic Theory as one of the invited speakers, giving a delightfully-titled talk on “Facts, alternatives, and alternative facts”. Pranav had these non-alternative facts to say about the experience:
“This edition of SALT was extremely well organized. It also included the first ever most distinguished pre-tenure paper award, which went to Ryan Bochnak (grandalum of the department) for a paper on sequence of tense in Washo, a language with optional tense. The sessions were thematically tight, but the program was expansive, with talks and posters in formal and experimental pragmatics as well as formal semantics. Included in that mix was a provocative co-authored poster by alum Kyle Rawlins on the pragmatic components of questions, and rhetorical questions in particular and an extremely convincing co-authored poster by alum Marcin Morzycki on degree modifiers. There was a palpable focus on lesser-studied languages as well. Alum Scott AnderBois delivered a lovely talk on the interaction of reportative evidentials and imperatives in Tagalog and Yucatec. The invited talks were by Maribel Romero, Sarah Murray, and alum Chris Barker, who argued that NPI licensing should be viewed as governed by a scopal economy condition. For my part, I tried to give the new local speciality of fake facts a respectable semantics.”
LACARA TO TORONTO
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!
SLOGGETT OFF TO NORTHWESTERN
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.