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Professor Emeritus Jim McCloskey recently participated in a podcast about the Irish Language Renaissance, which is also featured on the LSA website. Here is a summary of the podcast:

Irish is among Europe’s oldest languages. It’s a near miracle that anyone speaks it today. Patrick talks with online Irish teacher Mollie Guidera whose students include a Kentucky farmer who speaks Irish to his horses; also with Irish scholar Jim McCloskey who developed a love of the language when he spent a summer living with Irish speakers. Irish is changing fast, with far more of its speakers learning it as a second language, while the native-speaker population declines.

It was announced on April 28 that Distinguished Professor Emerita Sandra Chung has been elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. One of the oldest learned societies in the United States, election to membership is a signal honor. Congratulations, Sandy!

You can read the full announcement here. You can find a list of the newest members here: https://www.amacad.org/new-members-2022, where you’ll note that Sandy immediately alphabetically precedes incoming classmates Sandra Cisneros and Glenn Close.

After emerging from an obligatory two-week home quarantine in Tokyo, Junko and Armin were involved (mostly virtually…) in linguistic activities at the Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) with their collaborator Haruo Kubozono  (who was a one-year Fulbright scholar in our department in 1994-95). In the process, they presented at the Prosody and Grammar Festa (Jan 29-30, 2022) “Postnasal Voicing and the stratified lexicon of Japanese” (https://www2.ninjal.ac.jp/past-events/2009_2021/event/specialists/project-meeting/m-2021/20220129/), taking up former work of their own and recent contributions by Jennifer Smith (UNC, Visiting Assistant Professor at UCSC in 2000-01). At the Graduate School of Humanities of Kobe University, they gave a keynote lecture entitled  “An OT typological perspective on Japanese lexical and postlexical accent”. The event, called “The Kobe-NINJAL Linguistics Colloquium: Frontiers of Japanese Language Research”, http://www.lit.kobe-u.ac.jp//event/2022-02-24-01.html) took place (actually in person!) on March 10, 2022 and celebrated Professor Kubozono’s retirement. There, they also met up with Maho Morimoto (UCSC Linguistics PhD 2020), who just got a three-year postdoc position at Sophia University.

Besides these activities, they were involved in two editorial projects. The first is with Haruo Kubozono, Oxford University Press, Prosody and Prosodic Interfaces, publication date: 05/12/2022. It contains contributions by Ryan Bennett (UCSC PhD 2012), Robert Henderson (UCSC PhD 2012), and Megan Harvey, on lexical pitch in Uspanteko as well as our joint paper with Jennifer Bellik (UCSC PhD 2019) and Nick Kalivoda (UCSC PhD. 2018) on matching and alignment. Junko (who is a fan of penguins) is very happy with the front cover of the volume!

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/prosody-and-prosodic-interfaces-9780198869740?lang=en&cc=gb The second editorial project, Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory Theory and Analyses, eds.  J.  Bellik, J.  Ito, N. Kalivoda and A.  Mester, will appear with Equinox (https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/syntax-prosody/), publication date:  01/03/2023. Besides the editors, other contributors are Santa Cruzians involved in the SPOT NSF project: Richard Bibbs, Dan Brodkin, Yaqing Cao, Benjamin Eischens, Edward Shingler, Max Tarlov, and Nicholas Van Handel.

Oh yes, in between all of this, they went to a Kabuki performance, a sumo tournament, and warmed up in hot spring onsens in Tohoku and Hakone.

Congratulations to Ph.D. alum Vera Gribanova who has been awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. After completing her dissertation in 2010, Vera joined the Department of Linguistics at Stanford, where she is currently an Associate Professor. You can read her profile at the Guggenheim Foundation website here: https://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/vera-gribanova/. (You might also recall that Vera received the C. L. Baker Award in 2021!).

 

WHASC is pleased to announce that three Winter 2022 graduates – Emilio Gonzalez, Sarah Gray, and Carmen Gray – have received Departmental Honors for the Linguistics B.A. It is a well-deserved achievement.

PhD student Ben Eischens will be joining UCLA Linguistics as an Assistant Professor in Fall of 2022. Ben’s central area of research is the interface of phonetics and phonology, with an ongoing line of original fieldwork and investigation in San Martín Peras Mixtec.

Congrats, Ben!

Hitomi Hirayama (Ph.D. 2019) recently accepted a new position to join the Faculty of Business and Commerce at Keio University, as a tenured assistant professor. Hitomi writes: “I mainly teach English at Hiyoshi Campus in Kanagawa, but I also conduct a general education seminar on pragmatics there. I’m nervous and excited to teach in person for the first time in a while!  I hope things will calm down soon and we can see each other in person somewhere in the world. When you have a chance to visit Japan, especially the Tokyo/Kanto area, please do let me know!”

 

Congratulations, Hitomi!