Guggenheim to Gribanova

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!).

 

UG Honors

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.

Eischens to UCLA

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!

Hirayama to Keio

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!

Gong to UCSC

Mia Gong, currently finishing her Ph.D at Cornell, will be joining the department as an Assistant Professor in Fall of 2022. Mia’s central area of research is theoretical syntax and the syntax-morphology interface. Her work brings to bear data from original fieldwork in Mongolic languages on such fundamental questions as the nature of phrasal movement and of linearization.

 

Congrats, Mia, and welcome to Santa Cruz!

Chuspie Forever!

The 35th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing took place (virtually) at Santa Cruz over Spring Break: March 24-26, 2022. Organized by an interdivisional committee of language scientists at UCSC, HSP brought together over 1100 registered participants from 15 timezones for 3 days of papers (27), posters (274) and invited talks (6). It featured presentations by numerous Banana Slugs, including Vishal Arvindam, Lalitha Balachandran, Richard Bibbs, Yaqing Cao, Maya Wax Cavallaro, Jack Duff, Jean E. Fox Tree, Matthew Kogan, Jess Law, Allison Nguyen, Stephanie Rich, Ivy Sichel, Maziar Toosarvandani, Nick Van Handel, and Matt Wagers; and alums Caroline Andrews, Kirby Conrod, Steven Foley, Jed Sam Pizarro-Guevara, and Shayne Sloggett. Recordings of the spoken presentations can be found at https://tinyurl.com/hsp2022-public.

 

The spirit of (C)H(u)SP, lovingly but sporadically phonologized in the halls of Stevenson as tʃ{u,ʊ,ʌ}sp, was represented by our beloved mascot, Chuspie the Otter. Thankfully, it’s not too late to score some Chuspie merch (https://www.chuspieshop.com), such as the fashionable but controversial bucket hat. For a little history of the conference – and, particularly, its name – surf over to Arnold Zwicky’s blog (35 years of the CHSP | Arnold Zwicky’s Blog).

 

Whasc Profile: James Funk

Continuing with the trend of interviews, this week we have an interview with James Funk, the department’s graduate advisor and program coordinator.

Whasc: so unlike our past two interviewees, the move to Santa Cruz has been more of an expedition for you than a return. Could you tell us a bit more about the path that has brought you here?

James: I was just starting as a visiting assistant professor of English at UC Riverside when my partner got a job in Santa Cruz. My plan was to join her here at the end of the 2019-20 academic year, but my actual relocation date turned out to be March 13, 2020: I thought I was just driving up for an extended spring break, but the only time I returned to Riverside was to clear out our apartment a couple months later. I spent the 2020-21 academic year lecturing (remotely) at UC Irvine, but by then I was ready to experience the university from a slightly different perspective. I’m glad to get the opportunity to do so at UCSC.
Whasc? After the past year, how do you find Santa Cruz, compared to Irvine and Riverside? And how has it been to adjust to things here in this time?
James: On the one hand, Santa Cruz is radically different from the places I lived in Southern California (Irvine for grad school, then Riverside). One example: I replaced my running route in Riverside, which took me through a subdivision and a business park, with West Cliff Drive. But there’s a way in which I still haven’t experienced Santa Cruz. Not only did the pandemic limit my ability to explore the town, but it allowed me to continue my professional life in Southern California even though I physically resided here. I feel like I’ve only recently made the full transition, and I really need to start making up for lost time.
Whasc: the pandemic has provided us with plenty of time to sit and think. Could you tell us a bit about how you’ve filled this time, and what you’re planning to do once it’s slightly less bad?

James: I spent part of the pandemic getting married. Maybe one day I’ll get to go on a honeymoon?

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