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Alumni
Recent Alumni News
On Saturday, the 15th of October, UW hosted the 20-year celebration of our CLMA/CLMS program at wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ – Intellectual House.This hybrid event, much like the graduate program it represents, was hosted with a speech by Emily Bender. There was then much time for talking with alumni from 2025's cohort, all the way back to our first cohort's graduated class. For in person attendees, there were drawing stations and board games, food and refreshments, and a photo booth stocked with spooky…
Richard Wright, professor and longtime chair of the UW Department of Linguistics, has been appointed to serve as the interim Divisional Dean of Humanities for the UW College of Arts & Sciences. His term of service will begin July 1, 2026, following the completion of Brian Reed’s term as the current Divisional Dean. With College of Arts & Sciences Dean Dianne Harris retiring in June 2026, Wright will lead the Humanities Division until the College’s new dean identifies a permanent…
We congratulate our colleague Sharon Hargus on her retirement from the Department of Linguistics in June 2025. Her hard work for the department and collegiality will be sorely missed. Sharon started her career at UW in 1985 after receiving a Ph.D. in Linguistics at UCLA. She served the Department of Linguistics as Associate Chair, Graduate Program Chair, and numerous other vital roles. Sharon taught classes in phonetics, phonology, and morphology, as well as field methods and introduction…
Dr. Kirby Conrod started their linguistics journey via a double major in Linguistics and Literature for their BA at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where they discovered a deep love of syntax. After spending time teaching English in Taiwan, they then moved to Seattle, Washington to pursue their PhD in Linguistics at the University of Washington, where they specialized in syntax and sociolinguistics, advised by Professors Citko and Wassink. Their 2019 dissertation, …
In 2022-2023 the department awarded 53 Bachelor of Arts degrees, 42 Master of Science degrees and 1 Doctor of Philosophy degree. Congratulations to all of our graduates! We were delighted to celebrate your successes during our June commencement ceremony.
We were also delighted to welcome back Chia-Hui Huang (2003 PhD) as our commencement speaker. Chia-Hui distinguished herself both in academia, during her time at the University of Washington and the University of…
In June 2022 Nathan Loggins received his PhD in Linguistics, filing his dissertation entitled Ethnic History and Language Typology in Western China: The Cases of Xining, Daohua and Bai.
The goal of Nathan’s dissertation was to trace language development along the lines of social history in three multilingual regions across China’s historical frontier with Tibet: Amdo on the modern Qinghai-Gansu border, the Kham region of western Sichuan, and Dali in Yunnan.…
2021 PhD Amandalynne Paullada was interviewed on 7-27-22 by Kirsten Martin of Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center concerning her article "Machine Translation Shifts Power", which was published in 2021 in The Gradient while she was still a PhD student.
In the article and the interview, Paullada gives examples of how grave misunderstandings can result from the crudeness of machine translation crudeness or from taking statements taken out of context. …
The department was delighted to welcome 2019 PhD Brent Woo back to UW as this year’s (June 2022) commencement speaker.
The introduction by Woo’s advisor, Barbara Citko, detailed his many accomplishments at UW. For those of us who remember Woo as a great citizen of the department, it’s no surprise that he has been an active participant in the Linguistic Society of America, featured on the 2018 LSA member spotlight and also participating in a panel on…
Betsy Evans, (Associate Professor, UW Department of Linguistics), Russell Hugo (2016 PhD; Assistant Director, UW Language Learning Center), and Alex Panicacci (Postdoctoral Fellow, UW Department of Psychology), some of the members of the Linguistic Bias Working Group, presented on ‘Language as Part of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion agenda’ on May 13, 2022, as part of a colloquium on Social Justice Pedagogies Across Language and Culture…
In December 2021 Ben Jones successfully defended and filed his dissertation, The Spatiality of Perceptual Dialectology, supervised by Betsy Evans.
Jones’ dissertation focused on language attitudes and ideologies towards English in the state of Maine. Respondents in Jones’ study were asked to use the Folk Linguistic Online Mapping tool developed by Betsy Evans to draw regions of Maine after being given these instructions: “Is it…