Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin

We are thrilled to celebrate our very own Jessy Li, as well as Milos Gligoric from UT’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, for winning a Fall 2025 Amazon Research Award! Their grant is titled “Documenting and Recommending Tactics in HOL Light.” More information is available here: https://www.amazon.science/research-awards/latest-news/fall-2025-amazon-research-awards-recipients-announced. Congratulations, Jessy and Milos!

Our students are going places! Elizabeth Wood (Ph.D., 2024) has been awarded the Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellowship from the Spanish government to work for three years at the Universidad del País Vasco. She will be working with Gorka Elordieta. Congratulations, Lizzy!

We are excited to announce that Lindia Tjuatja will be joining us as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics. She is finishing her PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, and will start at UT in Fall 2027 as part of our computational linguistics faculty and UT’s broader NLP community.

Lindia is an alum of UT Linguistics and Electrical and Computer Engineering. While at UT, she was named one of the Dean’s Distinguished Graduates.

Welcome (back!) to UT, Lindia!

Our department is hiring a faculty member at the rank of Assistant Professor of Instruction whose work is on semantics! See the following link for more details: https://apply.interfolio.com/187891 .

Apply - Interfolio

We hope you are enjoying your summer! We want to highlight this course offered this upcoming Fall by Professor Kanishka Misra. Registration is ongoing, and seats are still available!

We are thrilled that our very own Justin Power (Ph.D., 2020) has accepted a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Haverford College! Since Justin's graduation he has remained at UT as as a data analyst supporting Language and Area Studies for the College of Liberal Arts, but he will be off to a cooler climate in Pennsylvania. Congratulations, Prof. Power!

Two Linguistics students were honored in this year’s competition to select the Dean’s Distinguished Graduates of 2026. Gabriella Chronis, Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics, was named one of the five Dean’s Distinguished Graduates for PhD students. And just earlier this month, she defended her dissertation "NLP as Language Ideology: Ways of Speaking of Speaking Machines"!

Meanwhile, an honorable mention went to Dantes Martinez for the undergraduate Dean's Distinguished Graduate award. Dantes is an undergraduate Linguistics and Anthropology double major who is just completing his honors thesis on the use of Belizean Kriol in the political speech of Belize.

Congratulations, Gabriella and Dantes, on your achievements at UT!

Congratulations to our newest Ph.D. in Linguistics, the now-Doctor Gabriella Chronis! Gabriella defended her dissertation, "NLP as Language Ideology: Ways of Speaking of Speaking Machines," last Wednesday, April 8. Her dissertation advisor are Prof. David Beaver and Prof. Katrin Erik.

Many congratulations to Hongli Zhan for successfully defending his dissertation entitled "Towards Emotionally-Intelligent AI Systems" on Thursday, April 2! His dissertation advisor is Prof. Jessy Li.

Congratulations to our doctoral student, Masha Cheremisinova, on the publication of A Grammar on Beserman! She is one of the authors of this grammar, along with Dr. Timofey Arkhangelskiy from University of Hamburg and Dr. Maria Usachea, who is an independent researcher.

This important work draws on many years of fieldwork within the Beserman community. It was only in 2021 that Beserman was officially recognized as a separate language. Since completing this grammar, Masha has moved on to document Yagua, an Indigenous language of Peru. Please see the post for more information on her Beserman grammar.

LINGUIST List 37.1298 Books: A Grammar of Beserman (2 vols): Arkhangelskiy, Usacheva and Cheremisinova (2026) The LINGUIST List, International Linguistics Community Online.