New jobs for alumni

New positions and homecomings for several recent graduates.

Congratulations to our recent alumni, who are moving on to promising new positions, in Montreal, New York, Paris, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Groningen, Tromsø and Singapore. 

With her dissertation in the bag – "Phasehood and Phi-intervention," supervised by Omer Preminger and Masha Polinsky, who oversaw three dissertations this year – Sigwan Thivierge *21 heads home to Quebec to become Assistant Professor of both First Peoples Studies and Linguistics at her BA and MA alma mater, Concordia University in Montreal. There she will be in the company of Maxime Papillon *20, who is on a postdoctoral fellowship at Concordia with Charles Reiss.

Also heading homeward is Anouk Dieuleveut, who in October begins a postdoctoral fellowship with Ira Noveck at the Laboratory of Formal Linguistics at the University of Paris under the auspices of the CNRS. With grant support awarded to her by the Fyssen Foundation, Anouk will work on the acquisition challenges presented by the modal vocabulary, now concentrating on French, in a project called "Learning to talk about necessities." The project develops the work Anouk has done at Maryland with primary advisor Valentine Hacquard, reported in her dissertation, "Finding Modal Force."

Aaron Doliana decamps to the New York office of Amazon Web Services, to work as a Language Engineer for their AI Data team, after a successful defense of his dissertation, "The syntax of wh-quantifier float in German," supervised by Howard Lasnik and Norbert Hornstein. 

Los Angeles welcomes one more Terp, as Rodrigo Ranero returns to California, where he did his undergraduate work, to become a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA, housed in the Institute of American Cultures and mentored by Harold Torrence from Linguistics, after wrapping up "Identity Conditions on Ellipsis," the second of three dissertations supervised by Omer and Masha. Rodrigo will be in the good company of our several Angelo alumni: Tim Hunter *10 and Laurel Perkins at UCLA *19 and Alexis Wellwood *14 at USC.

Also returning to the orbit of his youth is South Jerseyan and Eagles superfan Tyler Knowlton *21, who begins a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania's Mind Center for Outreach, Research, and Education, under the supervision of five esteemed mentors: John Trueswell and Liz Brannon from Psychology, Anna Papafragou and Florian Schwarz from Linguistics, and Scott Weinstein from Philosophy. Tyler plans to to develop the line of research in his dissertation, supervised by Jeff Lidz and Paul Pietroski, "The Psycho-Logic of Universal Quantifiers", on the mental representation and acquisition of meanings for quantificational determiners, starting with replication of his studies in other languages, like Italian and German, and acquisition studies with Penn PhD student Victor Gomes.

Farther afield, Paulina Lyskawa *21 has left College Park for the world's northernmost university – the Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø – for a postdoctoral research fellowship supervised by Bjørn Lundquist and Gillian Ramchand. The fellowship is supported by a project on "Experimental approaches to Syntactic Optionality," which focuses on word-order variation in Mainland Scandanavian languages, with an eye to theorizing optionality and (ir)regularity in syntax. Paulina's dissertation, third of Masha and Omer's hat-trick, concerned the irregularities of agreement with coordinated phrases: "Coordination without grammar-internal feature resolution."

Annemarie van Dooren *20 is back in her native Netherlands as a lecturer at the University of Groningen in its Semantics and Cognition Group, after earning her PhD with a dissertation on "Modals and their Complements in Dutch and Beyond," supervised by Valentine Hacquard and Maria Polinsky.

Finally, on August 1 Nick Huang *19 began his term as Assistant Professor in Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore, in 'Lion City,' after a  2-year postdoc with '07 alumni Jon Sprouse and Lisa Pearl, headquartered at at UConn, and a dissertation, supervised by Howard Lasnik and Colin Phillips, on "Variation and learnability in constraints on A-bar movement."

Best of luck to all of you! You all deserve your success.