Category: Student News

Welcome to the incoming graduate class of Fall 2013! Jennifer Bellik, Kelsey Kraus, Jason Ostrove, and Deniz Rudin will enter the Ph.D. program. Laura Gilmore and Maho Morimoto will enter the M.A. program. This year’s admissions process was very competitive, and we are fortunate that such an excellent group of students will be joining our community.

Many congratulations to Paige Crissman for receiving Honors in the Language Studies major, and to Ethan Kelly for receiving Honors in the Linguistics major. Well done to both of you!

Ph.D. student Mark Norris was one of two graduate students in Humanities to receive a year-long fellowship from the Institute for Humanities Research. As a fellow, Mark traveled to UCLA last weekend to take part in the annual UC-wide Society of Fellows event, designed to showcase the humanities at the University of California. Below he tells us about the two-day event. You can also read an interview Mark gave to the UC Humanities Forum about his work here.

Last weekend, I was in LA for the third annual meeting of the UC President’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities. This event featured talks from the graduate student and faculty fellows from all the UC campuses, following new formats that led to lots of interesting cross-disciplinary discussion. The faculty fellows formed panels of four scholars who each read a work of one of the others and then tried to connect it to their own. The graduate students gave 5-minute “lightning/ignite” talks: 20 slides, automatically advancing every 15 seconds. They’ll soon be on Youtube, but for those who are curious about the format or are just into things that are “meta”, here is an ignite talk about HOW TO GIVE AN IGNITE TALK.

I enjoyed hearing about scholarly work going on within other fields and puzzling about connections between the works. It was also inspiring for my own work in ways – thinking about how I frame my research and how I write/talk about the results. The event was just a part of Humanities in Circulation, a series of events organized by the UC Humanities Research Initiative to mark its 25th anniversary, some of which we also had the privilege of attending.

There were many Slugs present: Linguistics MA alum and Associate Director of the IHR, Irena Polic; my fellow graduate student fellow, Matthew Suazo (Literature); graduate student and Graduate Assistant for the IHR, Jessica Beard (Literature); and this year’s faculty fellows, Sharon Kinoshita (Literature) and Yiman Wang (Film & Digital Media). Among the panelists for some of the Humanities in Circulation events were Professor Emerita Angela Davis (History of Consciousness) and Professor Karen Tei Yamashita (Literature).

Many congratulations to Mark Norris, who passed his dissertation prospectus defense on April 2nd. Truly ABD. The committee was Sandy Chung, Jorge Hankamer (Chair), and Jim McCloskey.

Sara Cantor will be speaking this Wednesday, March 6, 3-4:30 at UC Berkeley’s Syntax and Semantics Circle. Sara will be giving a version of her LASC talk (see above!) on sluicing and relative clauses. Go here for more details.

Congratulations to Katia Kravtchenko for a successful defense of her first qualifying paper, “Effects of contextual predictability on optional subject omission in Russian”. (Committee: Pranav Anand (chair), Adrian Brasoveanu, and Jaye Padgett.) Katia just presented parts of this paper at the LSA, and she’ll do the same at CUNY at the end of the month.

Bern Samko attended the annual West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) at Arizona State University this past weekend, where she gave a talk called “A feature-driven movement analysis of English participle preposing”. Learn about WCCFL and read abstracts here.