- Last Updated on Wednesday, 05 May 2021 19:02
Vicki Carstens is Professor and Chair of Linguistics at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Her research area is generativist syntax, with a focus on African languages. Much of her work explores the theoretical implications of agreement and word order phenomena within the framework of Noam Chomsky's Minimalist framework. Her articles have appeared in the journals Linguistic Inquiry, Syntax, The Linguistic Review, and Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. (See published works.)
Michael Diercks is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Pomona College. He received his Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 2010. His main research interests include syntactic and morphological theory and the syntax and morphosyntax of languages of East Africa, mainly on the Luyia subgroup of Bantu languages. He has worked on the empirical domains of inversion constructions, object marking, complementizer agreement, and hyper-raising constructions, addressing theoretical questions about agreement, noun phrase licensing, and locality in syntax. His research has been published in venues like Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Lingua, Linguistic Inquiry, and Studies in African Linguistics.
Claire Halpert is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where she has worked since receiving her Ph.D. from MIT in 2012. Her research has focused on topics including case, agreement, A-movement, counterfactuality, and clausal complementation. Professor Halpert has explored these topics primarily through the lens of her site-based research on the Bantu language Zulu; she has been working with Zulu speakers in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, since 2006. Since 2011, her work has focused on the variety of Zulu spoken by speakers in Durban, South Africa. She was a Visiting Scholar at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2011, 2012, and 2015 and was an instructor at the African Linguistics School in 2011 and 2013.
Ruth Kramer is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her research concerns syntax, morphology, and the relationship between them, including topics like gender, number, syncretisms, clitic doubling, and agreement. She conducts research almost entirely on languages from the Afroasiatic language family, with a special focus on Amharic (Ethiosemitic). She published a monograph The Morphosyntax of Gender in 2015 with Oxford University Press, and her publications have appeared in such journals as Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Linguistic Inquiry, Syntax, Language and Linguistics Compass, and The Journal of Afroasiatic Languages. She received her Ph.D. in 2009 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she has been Associate Director of Afroasiatic Languages at Afranaph since 2012.
Justine Mukhwana Sikuku is a Senior Lecturer in the department of linguistics and Foreign Languages at Moi University, Kenya. He received his Ph.D. from The University of Nairobi in 2011. Between August and November 2011, he was a post-doctoral associate in the department of linguistics at Rutgers University. His research interests are in syntax and morphology, particularly in the nature of syntactic anaphora of African languages, as evidenced by his dissertation on the nature of anaphoric relations in Lubukusu. He is also the native speaker consultant on Lubukusu for the Afranaph project, and the Afranaph Sister Projects.
Jenneke van der Wal is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, and project leader of the NWO Vidi project 'Bantu Syntax and Information Structure .' After obtaining her Ph.D. degree at the same institute in 2009, she worked on grammaticalisation at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Belgium), was part of the ERC project ‘Rethinking Comparative Syntax‘ at the University of Cambridge, and taught at Harvard University. Her research combines finding new data on Bantu languages with developing theories on the interface between syntax and information structure.
