My Research

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the Ohio State University, with an additional appointment in the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme. I am also Collaborative Faculty in American Indian Studies. I specialize in language contact, change, and variation, with a particular focus on language ecologies of the Arctic and language endangerment and shift in Siberia. Since 2022, I have also been conducting fieldwork on Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic) in Greenland.

I received my PhD from the University of Chicago in 2020, with a dissertation on ongoing morphosyntactic change in Chukchi. My overarching research interest is developing a typology of languages in situations of unstable multilingualism and shift, including endangered languages, heritage languages, and contact varieties. My work integrates approaches from contact linguistics, sociolinguistics, experimental psycholinguistics, and formal syntactic theory.

Languages I have worked on include: Chukchi, Yupik, Even, and Sakha in Siberia; heritage Lithuanian in Chicago; and heritage contact varieties of Russian (Russian in Alaska and Ukraine). I am also passionate about understanding the unique challenges faced by Arctic peoples in the preservation of their languages and cultures.

My work has been funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS-1761551), a Russian Mega-grant (2020-220-08-6030), the Mellon Foundation, and the University of Chicago Humanities Division.

Updates

September 2024: I have several papers out this year -- my paper on the areality of noun incorporation in NE Siberia (in the Journal of Language Contact or on my website), my paper on variation in lexical pitch accent in heritage Lithuanian (open access in Languages), and my paper with Tran Truong (Penn State) on heritage speaker-targeted pedagogical practices in linguistics (in American Speech and on my website).

August 2024: I am presenting at an SLE workshop on "Psycholinguistic approaches to heritage, Indigenous, and minoritized languages" on my work on word order in Sakha (Yakut). I'm also presenting at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, on my work on Chukchi language contact across time.

May/June 2024: I am organizing a panel on "Language structure and language use in a changing Arctic" at ICASS 2024 (part of the Arctic Congress) in Bodø, Norway.

In the News

UChicago News article about my work in Greenland ("From Israeli digs to Greenland villages, UChicagoans travel the world for research", Sept. 19, 2023)