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. I direct the Linguistics Department's Fieldworkers' Lab (webpage to come soon!) and 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. Recently, I was awarded an NSF Linguistics grant (BCS-2518582) which will examine the relationship between information structure and syntax in two languages with discourse-sensitive grammars, Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic) and Hungarian. Our planned work includes traditional fieldwork as well as experimental psycholinguistic methods. This work is a collaboration with Eszter Ronai at Northwestern.

Updates

January 2026: I will be presenting on word order in Sakha at the 2026 Annual Linguistic Society of America Meeting in NOLA. Hope to see some of you there!

October 2025: I was the keynote speaker at the Florida Linguistics Yearly Meeting, held this year at UF in Gainesville. I also gave the OSU Linguistic Department's Annual Pedagogy Colloquium (together with Tran Truong of Penn State).

August 2025: I have been awarded a three-year NSF Linguistics grant (jointly with Eszter Ronai), entitled "Collaborative Research: LangDiv: The relationship between information structure and syntax."

In the News

I'm quoted in this story from the Center for Latin American Studies about the importance of support for endangered languages. ("Children’s book in Ngiva helps preserve indigenous language in Mexico", Nov. 18, 2025)

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

Contact