When I was 7 years old, my elementary school class went on a fieldtrip to our regional parliament. We shook our representative's hand and toured the halls of government, but what marked me most, was seing these Latin words traced in gold lettering above one of the Legislature's magnificent doorways:  A MARI USQUE AD MAREM. The guide asked, "who can tell me what this says"?

I hadn't yet studied Latin, to be honest, I'm not even sure that on my windswept plains, half an earth removed from the Mediteranean, that I'd even heard the word outside of an Astérix and Obélix comic. And yet, here I was with some intuitive sense that the words in front of me were some sort of "strange" French, language which I'd heard from my grandparents since my earliest youth.

With out knowing it, I'm certain that a linguist was born that day. I reverse derived the meaning, vigorously searching the reaches of my lexicon, intuitively engineering sound laws,  timidly guessing  'from sea to sea' : de mer à mer.

Greeted with the guide's approval,  I think  that  that curiousity has never left me, nor has my drive to form now slightly-more-informed impressions, hypotheses, which and I get to share, test and debate with colleagues and students alike.

Work experience

2023-

LLACAN - CNRS, Paris-Villejuif

European Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellow

Université de Tours

Lecturer (ATER) Department of Linguistics

Université de Lyon

Lecturer (Vacataire) Department of Linguistics

Concordia University, Montreal, Department of Classics, Modern Languages and Linguistics

Course Assistant

English as a Second Language Instructor