Winter 2023 Linguistics Newsletter

Congratulations to Emily M. Bender, who on 1-31-23 was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, along with three other UW researchers.
Congratulations to Naja Ferjan Ramírez, who is the recent recipient of a three-year Distinguished Professorship in Language Acquisition and Multilingualism. This professorship was made possible by an endowment to the College of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Ferjan Ramírez directs the Language Development and Processing (LDP) Lab in the Department of Linguistics. The lab studies how diverse… Read more
Graduate student Trent Ukasick is the first recipient of the Arienne Dwyer Language Documentation Award, made possible by a fund generously established in 2022 by UW Linguistics affiliate faculty member, Arienne Dwyer.  Ukasick will receive $500 from the fund to assist with dissertation research expenses.  He plans to spend most of 2023-2024 documenting the under-studied Gyegu dialect of… Read more
DeafNation Expo, one of the biggest Deaf expositions in the United States, took place on November 5, 2022, at Seattle Center Exhibition Hall, including two UW Linguistics booths.  The ASL program, directed by Lance Forshay, and the Neuroplasticity and Language Lab, directed by Qi Cheng, both had a strong presence.  A number of students from UW’s ASL classes, from beginning to advanced, also volunteered at DeafNation Expo.  The… Read more
On January 25, 2023, UW's ASL club hosted the Deaf Professionals Spotlight, a Zoom webinar meant to give d/Deaf professionals a platform to share their experiences working in a variety of professional fields. The current vice president of ASL Club, Alessio Tosolini, a Linguistics and Computer Science double major, reported on the event:  “The panel was composed of Kellie Martin (small business owner and art director for Deaf Spotlight), Austin Vaday (Software Engineer at Snap Inc.), and… Read more
UW Linguistics welcomes affiliate Prof. William D. Lewis back to campus Spring 2023 to teach LING 575G-I, Language Technologies for Crisis Response, for the computational linguistics program.  Lewis, a co-founder of UW’s Computational Linguistics Masters Program (along with Emily M. Bender and Fei Xia), taught at UW 2005-2007.  Subsequently, Lewis worked at Microsoft on the Translator Team until 2020, eventually becoming… Read more
The first, open round of the 2023 North American ComputationalLinguistics Open Competition (NACLO) tookplace at UW in the HUB on Jan. 26, 2023, with about 30… Read more
The Department of Linguistics successfully completed its latest ten-year review, required of all academic departments at UW and overseen by The Graduate School. This time there was an eleven-year gap between reviews, as the review process started in 2019-2020, with a departmental committee chaired by Alicia Wassink and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld. However the review had to be postponed one year due to COVID-19 concerns, and in 2021 Sharon Hargus replaced on-sabbatical Wassink. A review committee… Read more
Sadly, Asian Languages and Literatures (AL&L) Professor Emeritus Harold Schiffman, also adjunct in Linguistics and Anthropology, passed away recently. A brief remembrance of his life and academic contributions has been written by Michael Shapiro (former chair of AL&L, adjunct in Linguistics, and Divisional Dean of the Humanities). … Read more
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