LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT ROUND-UP: 2022-2023

Welcome new and returning students! We hope that your summer was enriching and that you had a great first day of the school year. 

As the Fall 2023 semester gets started, the Linguistics department wants to recognize all the things and people that helped to make our department better and who made achievements with us in the last year.

Among the distinguished visitors we invited last year, we hosted a visiting researcher from Nikolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, Prof. Michał Głuszkowski, who gave a lecture and a workshop while he was here on campus. We also sponsored a lecture by Prof. Donna Jo Napoli from Swarthmore College, and Prof. Michael Putnam from Penn State also gave a talk as part of our spring 2024 Linguistics Colloquium Series.

A number of our graduate students presented their work at conferences, such as the Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society, the Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, and the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics. Ph.D. student Seaira Lett won the best Graduate student paper award for her presentation on the endangered Mayan language Chuj at the 26th Annual Conference on the Americas, and she also received a Willson Center Graduate Research Award this spring to continue her fieldwork on this language.

Austin Brailey-Jones and Betsy Miller (with Dr. Peggy Renwick) won first place at UGA’s AI Research Day for their poster presentation, and Donnie Dunagan and Shulin Zhang (with Dr. John Hale and others) won third place with their poster.

Ph.D. student Meg Fletcher received a Fulbright-Hays award to participate in an 8-week Zulu language immersion program in South Africa this summer. Several of our undergraduate students, including Cullen Gibbons, Sarah Kudyba, and Jill McLendon, presented their research projects at the 2023 symposium of the Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities.

A team of faculty members, including Dr. Renwick, Dr. John Hale, and Dr. Keith Langston received an NSF grant for a project to document endangered language varieties in the Istria and Kvarner regions of Croatia. 

Dr. Peggy Renwick also received the 2023 Graduate School Outstanding Mentor Award in the Humanities and Fine Arts, one of just 2 such awards given at UGA this year. Associate Dean Anne Shaffer comments that this award “reflects [Peggy’s] excellence in supporting graduate students’ research, scholarship, and professional development in myriad ways.”  

We welcomed Dr. Dustin Chacón to our faculty in January of this year. Dr. Chacón’s research involves theoretical syntax and semantics, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience, and makes use of brain imaging techniques. He is teaching a new course on Pyscholinguistics this spring, and another new course on experimental methods in linguistics in the fall, which will become regular parts of our curriculum. He recently finished setting up a new EEG machine in the linguistics lab and is running his first test subjects. We’re excited to have him join our department and to expand our curriculum.

This does not nearly cover everything that we got up to last year, and we are looking forward to all of the successes to come in the 2023-2024 school year. We are excited to keep the momentum going!