Category: Alumni News

WHASC is proud and delighted to relate that Ph.D. alum Robert Henderson has just accepted the offer of a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in the Linguistics Program at Wayne State University. Congratulations, Robert!

Emily Manetta graduated with the PhD in linguistics from UCSC in 2006 and since then has had a faculty position in the Linguistics Program at the University of Vermont. Emily is a theoretical syntactician with a specialization in the comparative syntax of the Indic languages, especially Kashmiri and Hindi-Urdu. On her way from Vermont to the FASAL 3 meeting in Los Angeles, where she is to present a paper on parastic gaps in Hindi-Urdu, Emily made a lightning visit to Santa Cruz and to the department, and WHASC had a chance to catch up with her over fudgies in the Stevenson Coffee Shop.

WHASC: So, Emily, you’re close to tenure now and your book is out and a couple of big papers in Linguistic Inquiry. What are you working on at present? What’s new?

Emily: I’m still plugging away at some important questions about what we should expect to see if there is indeed real wh-movement in the Indic languages, which have been more traditionally understood as being wh-in-situ languages. What about sluicing? Parasitic gaps? And how are these constructions best analyzed in these languages? Right now I’m working on what I hope will one day be a second book that collects some of these analyses into a coherent whole, as well as some larger articles that continue to explore a comparative approach to the left and right peripheries in Indic languages. There are really some fascinating ongoing conversations out there that I am enjoying being a part of, and that are driving my research agenda at the moment. I must say I am looking forward to my sabbatical!

WHASC: You’ve been spearheading the development of a linguistics program at the University of Vermont. Where is that process now?

Emily: The Program in Linguistics is up and running! We have around 30 majors and a strong group of minors as well. The now entirely student-driven linguistics club and speaker series (employing an acronym of which I’m particularly fond: LUVM—Linguistics at UVM) meets weekly (!) and we are sending our undergrads to present their work at regional meetings like the McGill Undergraduate Linguistics conference in Montreal. A few have even already moved on to PhD programs, and our own Amy Goodnough (2012) gave a paper at LSA in January that she developed in my wh-questions seminar (‘Salience, Negation, and the Question-Answer Pair: the Not X Construction’). All in all there is a lot of energy and I am hopeful that one day reasonably soon as we grow our major, we will be able to grow in terms of faculty as well.

WHASC: Looking back, what was the transition from life as a graduate student to life as a faculty member like? Was there anything that really took you aback? Did you feel prepared for the transition?

Emily: I am happy to say that I felt that UCSC did a great job preparing me for the juggling act that is life as a faculty member at a large research institution with significant undergraduate teaching loads. From observing our own faculty at UCSC, I certainly understood what it looked like to constantly push forward an active research program. And on top of this I had not only TAing and teaching experience, but also came from a graduate program that taught me to value the art of teaching and to respect my students and their interests. Of course, nothing can fully prepare you for the time management crisis that junior faculty often face, but I’ve been lucky enough to always be able to call on Jim if I get myself in real trouble so …

WHASC: Has your view of the field shifted much since leaving UCSC?

Emily: To a certain extent, yes. I feel that I spend a lot more time thinking more narrowly about my subfield and areas of particular interest (and that my reading and reviewing is more narrowly constrained in this way as well). This can be problematic, in that I am not always picking my head up to think about the broadest implications of what I do, although I find that teaching and advising are a very helpful mechanism for ensuring that you do this from time to time. But this narrowing can also be incredibly productive, as I feel that I am in direct conversation with a small group of scholars all pushing the same sets of questions forward. Useful and exciting!

WHASC: How’s the family?

Thriving! My husband Jonah Steinberg (an Anthropologist at UVM) and I have two young boys, ages four and one. I have never gotten less sleep in my life, and I have never been so happy.

WHASC: Anything you want to share with people at Santa Cruz?

Emily: Enjoy the extraordinary privilege that is being in the Linguistics program at UCSC! What an excellent group of people to learn from and with!

Interview by Jim McCloskey

Dave Teeple (Ph.D. 2009) is happily employed as a Linguist at Nuance Communications (makers of Dragon Natually Speaking software, among other things), in the Creative Development department. Dave writes: I’m helping to design text-to-speech systems for clients who shall remain unnamed. This involves, among other tasks, pursuing research related to improving pitch contour synthesis, so that one day HAL will say, as naturally as any human, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” At that point, Dave will be superfluous, and HAL will start engineering humans to talk more like it does. Until it too becomes superfluous and is discarded. At some point they hope to have brought these mutual improvements to the point where a single highly expressive hand gesture will suffice for all human-computer communications.

Tami Schuyler graduated from the MA Program in Linguistics at UCSC in 2001. Her much-cited MA thesis (Wh-Movement out of the Site of VP Ellipsis) was a study of the interaction among movement, focus, and ellipsis. Since graduating, Tami has made a career using her linguistic training at H5 in San Francisco. For the past year or two, however, she has returned to an old calling and been engaged in creative writing. Tami recently achieved a significant breakthrough in having her first story accepted for publication. The story (provisionally titled Ugly) will appear in February in the Cutbank Literary Magazine, a well regarded journal associated with the creative writing program at the University of Montana.