We are delighted to congratulate Prof. Cynthia Gordon of the Sociolinguistics concentration, who has been promoted to full Professor. This prestigious achievement is a testament to her outstanding contributions to the field and her dedication to student success. We are proud to have her as a member of our faculty and excited to see her continued impact on our community and beyond.

We are very pleased to welcome Prof. Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox who will be joining the department this Fall as an Assistant Professor in the Computational Linguistics concentration. Prof. Wilcox’s research, specializing in computational and psycholinguistics, utilizes computational modeling technology to understand how language processing and learning happen in the human brain. Prof. Wilcox received his Ph.D. in 2022 from Harvard University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the ETH in Zürich, Switzerland.

We are glad to share the news that Dr. Jungyoon Koh will be joining the department as an Assistant Teaching Professor for the 2024–2025 academic year. She earned her Ph.D. from Georgetown University in May 2024, completing a Dissertation called, “Interaction with and about conversational user interfaces: An interactional sociolinguistic approach.”

We are very happy that Dr. Brandon Waldon has joined Georgetown as a Postdoctoral researcher. He specializes in formal and computational semantics/pragmatics as applied to legal language interpretation. Dr. Waldon is also affiliated with the Department of Computer Science and the Massive Data Institute. He will continue with us through the next academic year as a Fritz Family Fellow, working with Prof. Nathan Schneider in the Department of Linguistics and Prof. Kevin Tobia at the Georgetown University Law Center.

We are pleased to also welcome Dr. Jessica Kotfila, who will join us in September for a year as the Director of Georgetown University’s Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science, which we are bringing under the department’s umbrella. Dr. Kotfila’s expertise and leadership will be invaluable as we work with her and cognitive science faculty across Georgetown to update and integrate this long standing program.

We are sad to have to say goodbye to Dr. Matt Hewett, our Postdoctoral Fellow in the Theoretical Linguistics concentration. He will be leaving Georgetown in December 2024 for an exciting new opportunity—joining the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania on the tenure track. Hurray and congratulations to Dr. Hewett!

We were also sorry to have to say goodbye this year to Dr. Laura Tan who left us in July. As a postdoctoral fellow, Laura assisted the Assessment and Evaluation Language Resource Center (AELRC) with their 3-year project, “Understanding Language Outcomes for Foreign Language & Area Studies Program.” She also  taught LING 5242: Survey Methods in Language Research. We appreciated all her contributions and wish her the very best in her future endeavors.

This year Prof. Alison Mackey completes a ten-year term as Editor-in-Chief of the influential international journal the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (published by Cambridge). Under her editorship, the journal’s rank steadily rose (even reaching 1/181 in the Linguistics category of the Journal Citation Reports © Clarivate Analytics for 2017). Amongst many changes she introduced during her tenure, was the introduction of open materials via uploading to IRIS (Instrument Repository for Research into Second Languages) or any other permanent online repository as part of the Center for Open Science initiative’s Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines.

Prof. Lourdes Ortega received an Honorary Doctorate from Hellenic American University this summer. The Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters Honoris Causa was in recognition of her “inspiring research” and “impactful work” on multilingualism. Hellenic American University is a private university in Greece. She attended the 2024 graduation ceremony in Athens, where she gave the commencement speech and was hooded. Prof. Ortega also recently finished her term as President of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) this March of 2024. She is serving on AAAL’s Executive Committee as Past President until March 2025.

Prof. Michael Obiri-Yeboah was the recipient of a Georgetown University Curriculum Enrichment Grant in the Fall of 2023 and the Spring of 2024. The grant from Center for New Design in Learning and Scholarship to support classroom improvement towards teaching and learning In the Fall of 2023, that grant was utilized in LING 4402: Language Endangerment & Document Linguistics and in LING 5104: Field Methods in the Spring of 2024. 
Prof. Michael Obiri-Yeboah was also elected Executive Member on the Executive Committee of the Association of Contemporary African Linguistics. His term will last until 2027.

Prof. Amir Zeldes received a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of his project Coptic Scriptorium, a website devoted to Coptic language and literature, together with Caroline T. Schroeder, a professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Oklahoma. Prof. Zeldes and his team published the first computationally annotated data in Bohairic Coptic. Prof. Zeldes also recently hosted a virtual workshop with Dr. Caroline Schroeder (University of Oklahoma) on how to run linguistics searches in Coptic data. You can watch that webinar here. 

Prof. Cynthia Gordon gave a virtual talk March 28, 2024 based on her chapter “Positioning Theory and Goffman” in The Routledge International handbook of Positioning Theory as part of the Positioning Theory Virtual Series, Spring 2024, hosted by the Institut for Kommunikation og Psykologi, Aalborg Universitet (Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University) in Denmark. 
You can watch the lecture here.

Prof. Paul Portner was an invited speaker at the MECORE workshop in Konstanz (June 18–20, Titled: “Two approaches to mood: Operator or agreement?”) and at ZAS in Berlin (June 27–29, Titled: “Comments on Meyer’s paper: ‘Conversational principles and overconfidence’”). He also gave an invited talk at McGill University in Montreal on March 15th (Titled: “Social relations and scalar implicature”) and was a co-author on two presentations with Ph.D. Candidate, Xiang Li (Theoretical concentration), one at the WCCFL conference in UC Santa Cruz and one at the Tu+8 conference at Harvard. He was also an invited speaker of a talk co-authored with Prof. Raffaella Zanuttini (Yale) and Miok Pak (GWU) at the Brussels Conference on Generalitze Linguistics (Titled: “Embeddability and performativity in markers of speaker-addressee relation”).

Prof. Amir Zeldes participated in a panel discussion in November 2023 on the topic of Generative AI. The panel was organized and moderated by Prof. Grace Hui Yang (Department of Computer Science).

Prof. Ruth Kramer recently returned from a month in Paris, where she was invited to be a visiting professor at the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle at Université Paris Cité. During her time there, Prof. Kramer offered a course on grammatical gender and delivered several talks on her ongoing research projects. For more details on Prof. Kramer’s course, please visit the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle’s announcement.

Prof. Michael Obiri-Yeboah joined African Linguistics School’s 2024 faculty. The African Linguistics School (ALS) is a two-week institute which brings the latest work in core areas of linguistics to students from African universities. Prof. Obiri-Yeboah was invited to teach Introduction to Phonology to graduate and undergraduate students who are interested in linguistics. This year, participants were selected from a number of African countries as well as US institutions. The faculty members are from the US, Europe and some former ALS alumni in Africa. The program ran from July 22 to August 2, 2024.

During 2023-2024, Prof. Marissa Fond hosted Dr. Rose Hendricks—-a cognitive scientist, independent researcher, and Research Director at the Association of Science and Technology Centers, which is a non-profit, global organization supporting science and technology centers and museums—as a Visiting Researcher. Together they collaborated to offer Georgetown undergraduate research assistantships (via the LING 3930: Research-based Undergraduate Linguistics Experience [RULE] course) on a project titled, “Thinking with metaphor for climate action.”

The Assessment and Evaluation Language Resource Center (AELRC) hosted 15 language teachers from the DC area and beyond for a one-day institute on the basics of language program evaluation. This institute, conducted in collaboration with partners at the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL), helped educators plan for and know how to conduct evaluations of their own language programs.

This summer the AELRC conducted virtual focus groups with 30+ students, instructors, and administrators across the U.S. as part of a multi-year research study, K-16 Language Program Articulation, to understand how to improve and expand language study in the U.S. as students transition from K-12 into post-secondary education.

With three years of funding totaling more than $300,000 from the U.S. Department of Education’s International Research and Studies Program, we are researching outcomes in language learning programs funded by the U.S. Department of Education through their well-known and popular Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) program. This summer we are designing and piloting survey instruments and conducting quantitative analyses of more than 10 years of outcomes data in more than than 150 different languages.

STARTALK-TBLT: Task-based Training for Critical Language Teachers is an online and in-person program about Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) theory and practice. This program is led by Prof. Lara Bryfonski (PI) and Prof. Alison Mackey (Co-PI), co-instructed by Applied Linguistics Concentration Ph.D. Candidate Caitlyn Pineault, and supported by graduate and undergraduate student staff, including Evelyn Díaz-Iturriaga, Nidhi Somineni, and Alison Manna. This program, first launched in 2023, includes a week-long, in-person instructional camp on best practices in TBLT.

STARTALK-TECH: Technology-based tools for Critical Language Teachers is an interactive online program that focuses on the integration and use of technology-based instructional tools for language classrooms. This program was led by Prof. Meg Montee (Project Director) and Prof. Alison Mackey (Co-Project Director). It was co-instructed by Applied Linguistics Concentration M.S. student Gatanna Andrade, and supported by student staff, including Shannon Victoria King and Camryn Hayes.

Dr. Hina Ashraf carries out research on multilingualism in Urdu and Arabic as part of the Initiative for Multilingual Studies (IMS). She also supports the curriculum and research for the Project ELEECT grant at Georgetown’s Graduate School’s Master of Arts in Educational Transformation (MAET). Dr. Ashraf is investigating the first and only Urdu-English dual immersion school in the country with a three-year grant funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s International Research and Studies Program, for which she is the PI.

Prof. Lara Bryfonski and Prof. Alison Mackey published a 2024 user-friendly book designed for language teachers of all levels and languages called, The Art and Science of Language Teaching, Cambridge University Press. This practical guide bridges the gap between linguistics research and classroom practice for language teachers providing clear summaries of key second language acquisition research, debunking common misconceptions, and offering ready-to-use student activities. With authentic teaching scenarios and online resources, it’s perfect for educators of all languages and levels.

Prof. Cynthia Gordon was recently interviewed by the popular DC gastro-advocacy restaurant Immigrant Food, discussing how immigration to America has morphed and shifted cultural foods and the dining experience. Check out her interview for the “What is American Food?” issue of the #ThinkTable.

Prof. Jen Nycz launched the Corpora of Mobile Speakers (CorMS) on June 25, 2024 with two corpora drawn from her NSF project, the New Yorkers in Toronto Corpus and the Torontonians in New York Corpus. She gave a multimedia presentation about the CorMS at the ICLaVE in Vienna (July 8th–11th).

Prof. Nycz during an August presentation (August 9, Titled: “Mobile people, mobile vowels: What accent changes can tell us about the linguistic system, and how to study them”) at the University of São Paulo a few days ago! ​​This week, she’s teaching a sociophonetics course to undergrads and grad students at the University of Campinas.

This Summer, in a first for the Department of Linguistics, Prof. Elizabeth Zsiga is teaching on the Bachelor of Liberal Arts BLA degree program run by the GU Prisons and Justice Initiative. She is teaching a section of our popular gateway class, “Introduction to Linguistics.”

Prof. Alex Johnston served on the Executive Committee of the 3rd Linguistics Career Launch (LCL) 2024 (#LCL2024), a 2-week online career bootcamp and conference designed by the Linguistics Beyond Academia Special Interest Group of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). The LCL aims to help linguists transition from academia to jobs in business, government, nonprofit, and tech. The 2024 program ran weekdays from 8am to 4pm PDT from July 15–26. LCL2024 featured interactive sessions on Gather.town and Zoom, including: 14 career panels, 7 career management sessions, 4 office hours, 2 career mixers, 2 mini-classes, and 1 career expo.

For more LCL details and future events: 

• Join the Linguistics Beyond Academia Special Interest Group 
• Check the LCL website
• Listen to the Linguistics CareerCast podcast
• Follow Linguistics Career Launch on LinkedIn, and 

Keep an eye out this fall semester for all the recorded sessions from LCL2024 to be released on the LCL YouTube channel.

Prof. Heidi Getz offered a new undergraduate course this past spring, LING 2370: Nature, Nurture, & Language. The course examines how human language is shaped by “nature” (the biological and genetic characteristics of human beings) as well as by “nurture” (the cultural and social contexts in which humans develop, learn, and use language). 23 enthusiastic students learned how spoken and signed languages are similar and different; how brand-new languages are structured; and how human language compares to animal communication systems.

General Linguistics Concentration Ph.D. Candidate Kris Cook served as the President of the Graduate Linguistics Student Association (GLSA) from 2022–2024 and won the 2024 Outstanding Leader in a Graduate Student Organization Award. This honor is for a graduate student who has made outstanding contributions to the campus community through their leadership, programming endeavors, individual skills, volunteer activities, service, and attitude in support of student activities as a leader of a student organization.

Calvin Engstrom (graduated Spring 2024) received the Francis P. Dinneen Award for Distinction in Linguistics, which was established as a tribute to the memory of the Reverend Francis P. Dinneen, S.J., Professor of Linguistics. The award is given to an outstanding graduating senior majoring in Linguistics.

Sociolinguistics Concentration Ph.D. Candidate Travis Richardson has been awarded a Fulbright in Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand). Through extensive ethnography of public and institutional spaces and interviews with both Māori and non-Indigenous learner-speakers, he aims to ascertain how te reo Māori speakers construct identities, authenticate certain speakers and not others, and position themselves vis-à-vis political and epistemic stances of biculturality and Aotearoa’s colonial history. He aims to determine how speakers navigate decisions on which language(s) may be used when, where, and by whom. All of this leads to his dissertation on how colonial histories—especially the concepts of Indigenous “shame” and colonizer “guilt”—impact the overall trajectories of language revitalization efforts across the globe, with specific focus on how te reo Māori’s revitalization might inform revitalization efforts of the Indigenous languages of the United States.

We are proud to announce that Caroline Gish, a 2024 graduate of our Computational Linguistics MS program, has been selected as part of the inaugural cohort of NobleReach Scholars. This program places early-career professionals in critical roles across federal agencies and leading tech companies, focusing on areas such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, biotechnology, business process innovation, and materials manufacturing. Each of the 19 scholars was selected from among hundreds of candidates from 90 universities nationwide, rigorously evaluated, and matched to the unique needs of their assigned mission-driven industry partners. During her one- to two-year fellowship, Caroline will work on projects with significant societal impact, benefiting from hands-on experience, multidisciplinary programming, and mentorship from industry leaders. We extend our heartfelt congratulations to Caroline and look forward to following her accomplishments in this exciting new role!

Undergraduate student Michelle Zhang, a rising junior studying Linguistics and Philosophy, received a $5,000 Royden B. Davis Research Fellowship to conduct her study, “Ebola Health Workers’ Linguistic Strategies in Outreach.” Under the mentorship of Erin Fell, Ph.D., Ms. Zhang compiled a multimedium database to comprehensively document interactions between health workers and patients during the 2013–2016 Ebola epidemics in West Africa. She is also coordinating with The Bellevue Hospital in NYC to conduct retrospective interviews from health workers who managed infectious disease communication. This data will provide a comprehensive view of healthcare workers’ linguistic strategies to address misinformation and conspiracy theories surrounding the epidemic.

Applied Linguistics Concentration Ph.D. Candidate Saurav Goswami was awarded the 2024 Graduate Student Award for his paper presentation at the 2024 American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Conference in Houston, titled, “The intertextual construction of ‘thirdness’ in India’s Supreme Court judgment on trans rights” on Saturday, March 16, 2024.

Applied Linguistics Concentration Ph.D. Candidate Caitlyn Pineault was awarded the 2024 National Federation of Modern Languages Teachers Associations’ (NFMLTA/ MLJ) Graduate Student Award for her paper presentation, “Advancing researcher-practitioner dialogues: Investigating K-12 world language teachers’ perceptions of second language acquisition research” at the 2024 American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Conference in Houston on Saturday, March 16, 2024.`

Sociolinguistics Concentration Ph.D. Candidate Hannah Fedder Williams received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2023 National Communication Association (NCA) Conference. Hannah presented her paper, “‘That big bad policeman’: Police and civilian identities constructed in dialogue and narrative types” at the 2023 NCA on Friday, November 17, 2023.

Dr. Talal Alharbi (Graduated August 2023, Dissertation: “A sociolinguistic study of subject-verb word order variation in Najdi Arabic”) is an Assistant Professor at Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University whose research interests include syntactic and phonological variation in Saudi Arabia, discourse analysis, and digital ethnography.

The 76th annual Georgetown University Roundtable (GURT) conference will be held from February 28 to March 2, 2025 and the theme is Language and Food. 

Prof. Cynthia Gordon is the organizer. The call for papers, announcement of the plenary speakers, and more information will be coming in early September.