2019 PhD Kirby Conrod, now a faculty member at Swarthmore College, received the Arnold Zwicky award from the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) on January 8, 2022 during the LSA's 2022 Annual Meeting in Washington DC. The award recognizes “the contributions of LGBTQ+ scholars in linguistics, and is named for Arnold Zwicky, the first out LGBTQ+ President of the LSA, who was elected in 1992.”
Conrod’s UW dissertation, Pronouns Raising and Emerging, supervised by Barbara Citko and Alicia Beckford Wassink, is a sociosyntactic analysis of a change in progress around the specific use of singular they. Their recent work focuses on nonbinary pronouns and other sociolinguistic approaches to morphosyntax. In addition to their contributions to linguistics on interactions between pronouns and social identity, Dr. Conrod engages in public-facing work (e.g. public talks, blogs, podcasts, tweets, etc.), which has played a significant role in sensitizing the field of linguistics and the general population to issues of cissexist and/or transphobic bias, for example how to ask gender in a linguistics study.
Conrod is also one of the founding members of the Linguistic Society of America’s Committee on LGBTQ+ [Z] Issues in Linguistics (COZIL), and one of the authors of COZIL's statement on misgendering.