MOVING ON
Alumna Taylor Bell, who earned the MA in 2012 following a double major in Language Studies and Anthropology, will enter the PhD program in Anthropology at UC Davis next Fall. Taylor plans to work in the area of Linguistic Anthropology.
Category: Alumni News
OPTIMALITY THEORY AND PUBLIC POLICY MAKING: ALUMNA SELENE TSOI REVEALS ALL
Selene Tsoi graduated from UCSC with the MA in Linguistics in 1994. She is spending the current academic year at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and WHASC took advantage of the opportunity to catch up with her.
WHASC: Selene, you earned the MA in 1994 with a thesis on the phonology of Cantonese. Could you fill us in on your career since then? What have you been doing?
Selene:
I have been working for the Government in Hong Kong as a member of the Administrative Service. We are responsible for policy development, as well as interfacing with the community, legislature and media. Rather than being assigned to a particular subject area, we are regularly rotated to different bureaux. My past portfolios included human rights, immigration policy, language education (marginally related to linguistics!) and teacher and school awards schemes. I was half-way through my three-year posting to the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in New York during the events of 911. I then spent a few years in the Chief Executive’s private office, around the time of the SARS epidemic. I found myself on the team responsible for accounting and bankruptcy policy and corporate law reform during the financial crisis a few years ago. Most recently, I worked on civil service benefits.
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ALUMNA TAMARA SCHUYLER NOMINATED FOR LITERARY PRIZE
We reported a little over a year ago that MA alumna Tami Schuyler had published a short story (Ugly) in the literary journal Cutbank, in Volume 78, 2013. It was recently announced that Tami’s story had been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The prize is given once a year by the Pushcart Press and it honors the best poetry and short fiction published by small presses in a given year. Winners of this year’s award will be announced in May.
ALUMNUS MARK SICOLI IN PLoS ONE
Mark Sicoli earned the BA in Linguistics and Anthropology at UCSC in 1995. He went on to earn the PhD in Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Michigan in 2007. Mark now has a position as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University (where he is a colleague of PhD alumna Ruth Kramer). Mark’s research and teaching interests are in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology and he is a specialist in the Zapotec-Chatino language family. He and his colleague Gary Holton of the University of Alaska Fairbanks have recently published a paper in the general online science journal PLoS ONE entitled Linguistic Phylogenies Support Back-Migration from Beringia to Asia. The paper, which has provoked a lot of interest, argues on linguistic grounds that the first Native Americans inhabited a large land-bridge in the area of what is now the Bering Strait for millennia and that linguistic migration patterns went in both directions across that bridge—from North America to Asia as well as from Asia to North America.
BARKER AT BERKELEY
Another distinguished alumnus, Chris Barker, will also be visiting Berkeley soon. Chris completed the PhD at Santa Cruz in 1991 and is now Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at NYU. Chris will deliver a talk to the Meaning Sciences Club at Berkeley on Logic versus pragmatics for ‘same’. The talk will take place in 3401 Dwinelle Hall, between 12:30pm and 2pm on Monday March 17th. An abstract is available here.
KIRCHNER RETURNS
On Wednesday, February 26, Jesse Saba Kirchner (Ph.D. 2010; now an Analytical Linguist at Google) returned to UCSC to give a presentation in the Research Seminar about careers for linguists in industry. Jesse’s talk surveyed the roles played by computational linguists and theoretical linguists in the high-tech industry, some current issues in natural language processing, which companies are currently hiring linguists, and what the transition from academia to industry is like. After meeting one-on-one with many of the grad students in the audience, Jesse, Sandy Chung, and Pranav Anand transitioned to the West End Tap & Kitchen to discuss how the Department could forge stronger connections with its undergraduate and graduate alums in industry.
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.
