Biography

I am the Chair of the Department of Linguistics and the Robert D. King Centennial Professor of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin, where I have been on faculty since 2007. I am also the Editor of the journal Language, the flagship journal of the The Linguistic Society of America. I completed my undergraduate work also at UT Austin in 2000, earning a BS in Computer Science and a BA majoring in Linguistics and Mathematics. I then began my graduate work in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University, where I earned an MA in 2002 and a PhD 2006. I also worked for the LinGO project at The Center for the Study of Language and Information from 2000-2006, while spending time as a visiting scholar at Human Communications Research Centre at The University of Edinburgh in 2002 and 2003. Before arriving back at UT as a faculty member I taught from 2006-2007 in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. In 2006 I earned the Walter J. Gores Award, Stanford's highest teaching award, and in 2013-2014 I was a Raymond Dickson Endowed Teaching Fellow here at UT. Mostly recently, in 2023 I was the inaugural Ivan A. Sag Fellow at The Center for Language Sciences at The University of Rochester.  I was born and raised in Longview, TX, where I attended Longview High School, focusing on journalism and theater.