2025 Slate of Candidates

The slate of candidates for LSA Officers & Executive Committee Members is now available. LSA members will be able to vote on these nominees in the election that will begin in September of 2025. The newly elected leaders will begin their terms at the conclusion of the 2026 Annual Meeting.

Candidates

The LSA Nominating Committee and Committee on Student Issues and Concerns (COSIAC) have selected a slate of candidates for our upcoming elections. The nominees are:

Should LSA members want to place additional names on the ballot, the LSA Constitution provides a way to do that. If by June 30, 2025 – six months before the Annual meeting – five percent or more of the members have separately and in writing nominated any additional individual member for Vice President or the Executive Committee, and that member agrees to be presented as a candidate for the position in question, then that name shall be added to the ballot. The requirements for placing additional names on the ballot for student representatives to the Executive Committee are essentially the same, except that five percent or more of student members must send in any additional student member's name.

Additional nominations should be sent to lsa@lsadc.org with the subject line "Additional Nomination for Vice-President," "Additional Nomination for Executive Committee" or "Additional Nominations Student Representative." The deadline for submitting additional nominations is 11:59 pm (EDT) on June 30, 2025.
 

Statement from the Vice President/President-Elect nominee

Tracey Weldon

Biography

Dr. Tracey L. Weldon is a Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of South Carolina (USC), where she serves as Interim Senior Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Faculty Development in the McCausland College of Arts and Sciences.
Weldon received her PhD in Linguistics from The Ohio State University (OSU), with a specialization in quantitative sociolinguistics and variationist approaches to the description and analysis of African American English (AAE). Much of her early work focused on the variable analysis of the copula and negation in AAE and Gullah, while more recent scholarship has examined the use and perception of AAE by middle-class speakers. Weldon has published several scholarly articles and book chapters, including papers in American Speech, the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language Variation and Change, and Language. She was co-editor of the 6th edition of The Language Files textbook, published by The Ohio State University Press. Her book on Middle Class African American English was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. And she currently serves as an Executive Editor and Advisory Board member for the forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of African American English (ODAAE).
 
Dr. Weldon has taught and mentored at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, including teaching courses such as African American English, Language and Gender, Survey of Linguistics, and Varieties of American English. She has given numerous conference presentations and invited talks, including keynote addresses for the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV), and the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL). Weldon is an Associate Producer of the Emmy award-winning NSF funded documentary “Talking Black in America,” which was released in 2017 by the Language & Life Project at North Carolina State University. And this summer, she will teach Word Up! A Focus on the African American Lexicon as the American Dialect Society (ADS) Professor at the 2025 LSA Summer Institute.
 
From 1995-2000, Weldon served on the English Department faculty at North Carolina State University before accepting a joint appointment in English and Linguistics at USC, where she ascended the faculty ranks to Full Professor. During her time at USC, Weldon has held several administrative positions, including Graduate Director of Linguistics, Associate Dean for Diversity, Interdisciplinary Programs, and Social Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, Interim Chief Diversity Officer, and Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost for Graduate Education. In August of 2022, Weldon left USC (and academia), to accept a position as Vice President of Executive Search at Greenwood Asher & Associates – an executive search firm housed within the Kelly Education division of Kelly, Inc. She was recruited back to USC in October of 2024 to assume her current role as Senior Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences.
 
Weldon has a decades long track record of service to the Linguistic Society of America, including membership on the Committee on Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics (CEDL), which she has chaired twice, the Taskforce on Procedures for Evaluating Professional Conduct, the Centennial Planning Committee, and the Centennial Student Fund Committee, on which she currently serves as an inaugural member.

Statement

I am deeply honored to have been nominated as a candidate for Vice President/President-Elect of the Linguistic Society of America. As a sociolinguist, I have dedicated my career to the study of language variation, with the goal of enhancing knowledge about language, in general, and dismantling prevailing myths about African American English (AAE), in particular. In the classroom, as in my research, I have strived to equip others with the tools needed to approach language as objective scientists and to recognize how ideological biases often skew our perceptions of linguistic facts. Recognizing that all languages, whether standard or non-standard, written, spoken, or signed, are systematic and rule-governed, allows us to view language from a more objective vantage point and to critically evaluate the many circulating myths that serve to perpetuate linguistic bias and discrimination. I have also dedicated my career to the pursuit of inclusive excellence in higher education and have strived to amplify the voices of those seeking to facilitate positive change in higher education. It is this passion and purpose that has led me to accept the nomination for the LSA’s next Vice President/President-Elect.
 
In this role, I plan to prioritize three primary areas of interest. First, in light of recent attacks on the basic foundations and principles of higher education, I vow to lend my voice and the authority of my position to the steadfast and unequivocal support of academic freedom and freedom of speech, recognizing that all members of the Society do not speak with one voice but that every voice matters. Now more than ever, I believe that this organization has a critical role to play in championing support for scientific research and humanistic inquiry. I will operate within the jurisdiction of the Executive Committee and LSA membership to advocate, where appropriate, in support of the public good and for the good of the profession.
 
Second, as we embark upon the next 100 years of this esteemed organization, I will urge us to engage in thoughtful reflection and dialogue about our mission, purpose and goals, such that we honor our legacy while charting a viable path forward. It will be essential that we make every effort to bridge generational divides and broaden our scope to be inclusive of the full diversity of subdisciplines that our society encompasses. Under my leadership, I hope to expand our membership by being responsive to the current needs of the profession and ensuring that the LSA remains a valuable and valued resource for linguists and the linguistic profession.
 
Finally, I hope to leverage the breadth of my professional experience to enhance and expand the professional development resources that the LSA offers to linguists at all stages of their careers, from job placement (both within and outside of the academy), to tenure and promotion, to the pursuit of administrative and executive leadership roles. By equipping linguists with the skills needed to advance their careers and thrive in the profession, we ensure the health and vitality of our discipline such that we might uphold our mission “to advance the scientific study of language… for the advancement of knowledge and the betterment of society” in perpetuity (https://www.lsadc.org/mission).
 

Statements from nominees for the Executive Committee

Sharon Hargus

Biography

Sharon Hargus is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington. Her primary research interests are in phonology, morphology and phonetics. She is especially interested in ejectives; voice quality and tonogenesis; and position class morphology and phonological domains. She has published in the International Journal of American Linguistics, Phonology, the Journal of Laboratory Phonology, the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, and numerous collections. She has devoted much of her academic career to the documentation of four Native American/First Nations languages (Tsek’ene, Witsuwit’en and Deg Xinag (Dene or Athabaskan family)), and Sahaptin (Plateau Penutian). She is committed to documenting languages in ways that serve both linguists and non-linguist members of of language communities. She has deep respect for the speakers of the languages who have shared their linguistic knowledge with her, including Virginia Beavert (Sahaptin); Mabel Forsythe, Sue Alfred, Lillian Morris (Witsuwit’en); Mike Abou, Mary Charlie, Peter Solonas (Tsek’ene); Alta Jerue, Hannah Maillelle, Edna Deacon (Deg Xinag), among many other speakers. She is the (co-)compiler of three dictionaries (for Sahaptin, Tsek’ene and Witsuwit’en) and online text collections for Deg Xinag, Tsek’ene, Witsuwit’en (and one for Sahaptin under review by relatives of the late Virginia Beavert), which add depth to linguistic descriptions as well as make the primary language accessible to speakers and their non-speaking descendants. She supports efforts to revitalize Native American languages, but stresses that there can be no revitalization without documentation. Her CV is available on her website, which also contains links to online dictionaries and texts.

Dr. Hargus is a life member of the LSA, and first attended the LSA in 1979 at the Los Angeles meeting. She served on the Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation. She received the Ken Hale award from the LSA in 2020. She is a long time member of a sister organization, the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas.

Dr. Hargus has always been interested in minority and under-documented languages. In 2005-7 she and Richard Ladner (Computer Science) (a CODA), in lobbied the administration of the University of Washington to begin offering American Sign Language courses. That effort was successful, with the first ASL faculty member hired in 2007, in a new program within the Department of Linguistics. Currently the ASL program at UW is very successful, with three faculty (all Deaf), offering classes through third-year ASL, and exploring the possibility of an ASL major.

Dr. Hargus has been a dedicated teacher, creating and constantly striving to improve classes that are useful and relevant to undergraduate and graduate students, including field methods (with speakers of Aleut, Ronga, Tigrinya, Gyegu Tibetan and Lhasa Tibetan), regional variation in English phonology, as well as classes in phonological and morphological typology and theory. She was the department’s TA coordinator from 2006-2020.

Statement

I have supervised or co-supervised 16 PhD dissertations at the University of Washington, and have been a member of many committees. Linguistics has benefited from the scholarship created by students devoted to producing the best quality dissertation they can, yet very few of these PhDs have obtained academic jobs.We all know how scarce these jobs are. Having observed the anguish of these students who unsuccessfully apply for academic jobs, how about if the LSA creates a space specifically for PhD dissertations under the Publications page, so that student work could be recognized nationally.

I support the LSA’s efforts to broaden diversity in membership and participation in the society, particularly by Native American students. I applaud the LSA’s support of the Native4Linguistics special interest group. Linguistics has made some advances in terms of decolonialization, such as the rebranding of CoLang, but further work needs to be done, such as encouraging more co-authorship with native speaker contributors, and creating a structure to facilitate mentorship of Native American students.

It would be an honor to serve on the Executive Committee of the LSA. If elected, I would particularly advocate for junior scholars, and for minority language speakers and their descendants.

Alexandra Johnston

Biography

Alex Johnston is an Associate Professor of the Practice in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University, where she has been a member of the sociolinguistics faculty since 2018. She serves as Director of Master’s Programs & Career Management. As a professional advisor and career discernment coach to hundreds of undergraduate, Master’s and doctoral students, Alex applies her background in professional development consulting for corporate, nonprofit and higher education clients to guiding students in their post-academic career discernment. She teaches the only full-credit, graduate-level proseminar course in “Career Management for Linguists” as well as a graduate course in Intercultural Communication. As a Master’s program director, Alex works to recruit and retain a cohort of 60 Master’s students across 5 concentrations in the Department.
 
Alex earned a PhD in Linguistics from Georgetown University, an MATESOL from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an MA in East Asian Studies from Stanford University, and a BA in East Asian Studies from Washington University in St. Louis. Her academic research has focused on high-stakes institutional gatekeeping encounters, such as using an interactional sociolinguistic approach to analyze the turn-by-turn unfolding of official permanent residency visa interviews between U.S. immigration officers and applicants for ‘green cards’. In the past 5 years, she has turned to analyzing the employability of graduates across the field of linguistics by collecting data on post-academic employment outcomes and developing the first data-supported statistics on the likelihood of attaining a tenure-line position in linguistics (tl;dr, <5%). Her book “Careers for Linguists: An Employability Guide for Students and Faculty” is under contract with Wiley.

Statement

I’m honored to have been nominated to stand for election to the Executive Committee of the LSA. If elected, I would continue efforts to make our organization as “big tent” as possible, which means 1) developing new initiatives to attract the expertise and contributions of linguists working in business, government, nonprofit and tech sectors to our Annual Meeting as well as in meetings and projects throughout the year (as both LSA members and potential donors), 2) cultivating revenue streams, such as corporate investment, that could contribute to supporting the attendance of lower- and fixed-income attendees at the Annual Meeting, and 3) bringing employability resources directly to departments and programs to support their linguistics students at all degree levels. I have a strong record of (co)leading the LBA SIG, collaborating with other LSA SIGs and Committees, and of leveraging my professional network on behalf of LSA projects, outreach and support. I would seek to continue and expand that record of collegial and supportive collaboration with the EC, our ED, our SIGs and Committees, our membership and future members.
 
I joined LSA in 2018, the year I was hired as a non-tenure line faculty member in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. This was a return to academia after years of building a corporate consulting business, working in international program administration in higher education, and wearing the many hats of a nonprofit director, ranging from recruiting and retaining members, donor cultivation and development, grant writing, and engaging in regular advocacy initiatives on Capitol Hill. In the LSA, I found an immediate home in the SIGs and Committees where I could focus my volunteer efforts on what I consider to be a moral imperative to serve our linguists and support our field: To provide tailored resources and effective training for linguists seeking post-academic employment.
 
In the past 7 years, my Linguistic Beyond Academia SIG co-leaders and I have developed the 1) Linguistics Career Launch (LCL), an international conference and employability bootcamp devoted to career discernment and career management, which has directly resulted in over 40 accepted job offers and counting; 2) The Linguistics CareerCast podcast, the only podcast devoted to the career stories of linguists working in business, government, nonprofit and tech, 3) A YouTube channel that hosts 75 edited webinars from the LCL conferences held in 2021, 2022, and 2024, and that will soon be moved into the LSA digital resource hub, 4) The Linguistics in Practice Award, a new award recognizing the contributions of linguists to various work sectors, and 5) A spin-off mini-podcast called “Linguists at Work”, featuring linguistics students interviewing working linguists. The LBA SIG was also awarded the Linguistics Service Award (2022) for developing the LCL conference/bootcamp.
 
I have been excited and encouraged to see so many positive changes in the LSA in recent years thanks to the decisive actions of LSA presidents and EC’s in planning for our current leadership under ED Margaret Vitullo and for our evolving organizational structure in the face of challenging budget constraints and market factors. These new developments have strengthened my commitment to the LSA more than ever as a professional home. Throughout my years of service to the LSA, I have demonstrated a strong record of collaboration, and have actively sought synergy with other SIGs and Committees, including developing organized sessions with the First-Generation Equity and Access Committee, serving on the Centennial Committee, volunteering with Pop-Up Mentoring Program (PUMP), and working with LEXING. This critical mass of efforts towards inclusion, connection and collaboration is a core strength of the LSA and one that inspires me to keep working on behalf of the organization. If elected, I look forward to continuing to expand a valuable professional network for all of our members and to developing new initiatives to support our professional association and our colleagues in the field in a challenging time.

Kevin McGowan

Biography

Kevin McGowan is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Kentucky where he is also Director of the Phonetics Lab, a member of the Lewis Honors faculty, and Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Linguistics. His primary research interests are in phonetics and speech perception with a particular interest in listeners' use, in both perception and production, of informative patterns of variation. Although not a sociophonetician in the traditional sense, McGowan's interest in the informativeness of variation often raises social questions alongside coarticulatory questions and matters related to the listener's role in sound change. He is coauthor, with Rusty Barrett and Jennifer Cramer, of the third edition of Rosina Lippi-Green's landmark text, English with an Accent and is currently preparing a 4th edition of this book. He has had the honor of teaching courses at 3 Linguistic Institutes (2013, 2017, and co-teaching in 2019) and has benefited tremendously from connections made, and feedback received, at annual meetings. McGowan teaches courses in phonetics; speech perception; syntax; computational linguistics; language discrimination; and the intersection of speech perception, third wave sociolinguistics, and puppetry. As DGS, McGowan has overseen the launch of a new doctoral program at the University of Kentucky which is currently in the process of admitting its second cohort. 

Statement

I am grateful to be nominated to this committee, and I am eager to participate in the work of the LSA EC because I believe that our society, in all of its various endeavors, is essential to the continued health and advancement of linguistics. We have entered a period of disruption and uncertainty in higher education in the United States and I believe now, in particular, it is important for people of privilege to use those privileges (race, gender, sexuality, language, dialect, etc.) to make room for more marginalized people. I believe it is important that the difficult work of equity and inclusion not fall exclusively on the shoulders of people whose lived experiences include systematic inequity and exclusion. There was a common thread through most of the 2024 nomination statements related to the need for the LSA to "welcome a big table: as Grieser put it, to, in Namboodiripad's words "be a source of support to scholars who experience harm or are otherwise minoritized in academic or academic-adjacent spaces." These needs are only more pressing in 2025 and I am eager to help confront them. 


David Quinto-Pozos

Biography

David Quinto-Pozos is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin and an affiliated faculty member of UT’s Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences. His research interests are in the linguistics of signed languages, including language contact and change, language acquisition, signed-spoken language interpretation, and embodied actions in signed languages. He has worked on American Sign Language (ASL), Brazilian Sign Language (Libras), and Mexican Sign Language (LSM), in addition to a variety of other signed languages that are part of a current project on signed language change.

David received his BA in Signed Language Interpretation and Religious Studies from the University of New Mexico in 1992, and his MA (1998) and PhD (2002) in Linguistics from UT Austin. He was on the faculty of the Linguistics Department at the University of Pittsburgh (2002-2004) and the Speech and Hearing Science Department at the University of Illinois (2004-2009) before returning to UT Austin in 2009. He has been on 28 dissertation committees and has served as co-/chair for eight, some of which are in progress. David has been a member of the LSA since 1998 and has served as Co-Chair of the Program Committee (2025 Annual Meeting) and as an expert on signed languages for media questions and for the planning of interpretation services for LSA annual meetings. He has also served as Treasurer of the Signed Language Linguistics Society (2013-2022) and as President (and other board positions) for Mano a Mano, a professional organization of trilingual (ASL-English-Spanish) interpreters (2004-2017). He was a certified signed language interpreter before beginning his academic work as a linguist.

David’s research has appeared in a broad range of journals, including Lingua, Journal of Pragmatics, Language and Communication, Language in Society, Language Learning, Cognitive Neuropsychology, TOPICS in Cognitive Science, Cognitive Linguistics, Sign Language Studies, Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, and Translation and Interpreting Studies, among others. His writings also appear in various edited volumes and handbooks. You can see his CV here.

Statement

I am honored to be considered among the 2025 nominees for the position of Member-at-Large on the LSA Executive Committee. It would be my hope to serve my profession and my professional organization by increasing opportunities for developing and established linguists whose voices have not been particularly prominent in the organization. This objective aligns with LSA’s Strategic Plan goal to ensure that the organization “…increases access and participation of linguists whose demographics are historically underrepresented in the discipline.”

For over a century, the LSA has been a key resource for linguists. Annual Meetings serve as a forum for sharing new work and receiving feedback from colleagues, with the addition of exciting new opportunities for dialogue that have recently emerged (e.g., the Language, Conflict and Peacemaking sessions and the LEXing sessions at the 2025 Annual Meeting). Linguistics Institutes and LSA-affiliated conferences (e.g., SALT, CoLang) have been mini think tanks for discussing specific areas of linguistics, through which some students jumpstart their learning. Of course, LSA’s academic journals have been prestigious outlets for the work that linguists do. It is my hope that these long-standing and more recent institutions continue their impact and increase it to even more audiences. In particular, I feel that the LSA could become even richer from more involvement of speakers of minority languages, since such speakers have a wealth of insight to bring to the field of linguistics.

In the subfield of signed language linguistics, I see deaf and hard of hearing colleagues whose expertise and insights could enrichen the analyses and perspectives of linguists who are not everyday users of a signed language. My language profile is like that of many colleagues who did not grow up with a signed language and who do not use a signed language at home with family. I am very grateful for the Deaf community’s willingness to support my language-learning journey over the past 35+ years, and I have benefited both personally and professionally from being a user of a signed language. My experience has informed my view that we need more representation of Deaf linguists in our field and in the LSA. Additionally, my hope is for more of my deaf and hard of hearing colleagues to become regularly involved in LSA activities. It would be an asset to the organization to have more representation of such colleagues in the work that the LSA does.

As another example, I feel that there has been an increase in the past few years in young people becoming excited about linguistics. I’ve been teaching introductory courses in linguistics at the university level for nearly two decades, and for years most students seemed to know little to nothing about the topic at the start of a course. However, I am now regularly seeing first-year undergraduates in my classes who have (informally or formally) studied some aspect of linguistics. Some of these students are interested in con-languages (constructed languages), others have studied a signed language (usually ASL) in high school and wish to learn more about research, and still others are interested in links between computer science and linguistics. However, what I don’t see as often is native or heritage users of minority languages becoming involved in linguistics. I would like to find ways to raise awareness about the study of linguistics for young learners of these and all backgrounds and support the start of their journey to becoming part of the LSA.

As such, if elected to the LSA Executive Committee, my goals would be to:

  • partner with deaf and hard of hearing colleagues to increase mechanisms for training, research work, and the dissemination of research findings (this aligns with LSA’s strategic goal of supporting mentorship experiences for members);
  • collaborate with deaf and hard of hearing colleagues and the Secretariat to develop a dedicated and sustainable fund for ASL-English interpretation support at Annual Meetings, Summer Institutes, and other activities of the LSA;
  • work with colleagues who teach introductory linguistics courses in high schools, community colleges, and universities to raise awareness of the wide range of linguistics careers available for students, including those in underserved schools and communities (this aligns with LSA’s strategic goal of expanding public awareness about linguistics through education and outreach);
  • support colleagues from various groups (including deaf, hard of hearing and other minority communities) in becoming more involved in LSA committee work and leadership.

It would be an honor to serve on the Executive Committee for the LSA. If elected, I would commit myself to increasing support structures for future generations of linguists. This work would hopefully support a broader community of linguists across different cross-sections of our field for leading us into the coming decades.

 

Statements from student nominees

Kelly Kendro

My name is Kelly Kendro, and I am a second-year PhD student in Applied Linguistics at Northern Arizona University. I joined the LSA in 2021 and presented at the 2024 and 2025 meetings. My background as a low-income, first-generation student affords me a unique perspective that can help the LSA continue to reach and support underrepresented populations to work towards a more inclusive and representative language science.

My passion for linguistic advocacy and justice is reflected in my leadership and service. At University of Utah, I served as treasurer, then president, of our department’s graduate student association. As a doctoral student, I am on the organizing committee for the 2025 Second Language Research Forum and the annual ROLE Collective symposium since 2024. 

Beyond academia, I have volunteered with Skype a Scientist to introduce students of all ages to linguistic research. I currently work with the Model Utah Jury Instructions Committee to improve the comprehensibility of jury instructions for laypeople. Through the US Department of Defense’s MINERVA Initiative, I examine the ethical implications of using AI in linguistic analysis for national defense. I am an active member of the ROLE Collective, working to provide guidance to programs and practitioners for evolving beyond essentialist categorizations of language.

I am eager to use this experience to help the LSA Executive Committee advance its mission and strategic vision.
 

 

Kyler Laycock

I am a first-generation Linguistics PhD student at The Ohio State University with research interests in speech perception, sociophonetics, and language variation. I have a history of investment and participation in meaningful service to the academic communities of which I am a member. I am interested in serving as the student representative on the LSA executive committee in order to extend the reach of this service beyond my department, and to the field more generally. Most relevantly, I have experience serving multiple terms on graduate student organization executive committees and as a liaison between students and faculty both at OSU and during my MA at the University of Kentucky. Recently, I served as graduate student representative member of Ohio State Linguistics' Phonetics Search Committee, and as a result feel confident in my abilities to understand the concerns, issues most at hand for current students, and to aggregate and convey this information to faculty. More generally, creating a sense of community and inclusion in academic spaces is at the forefront of my personal goals, and this seems to be especially aligned with many of the ongoing efforts of the current executive committee.
 

Statement from the Language Co-Editor Nominee 

Michael Putnam 

Biography 

Dr. Michael T. Putnam is Professor of German and Linguistics at Penn State University, where he also serves as the Director of the Linguistics Program, Associate Director of the Center for Language Science, and Director of the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies. Dr. Putnam received his PhD in Germanic Linguistics from the University of Kansas, specializing in formal approaches to syntax and morphology (including research on the mental lexicon) with an empirical focus on global heritage varieties of Germanic languages (e.g., German, Icelandic, & Norwegian) spoken throughout the world.

Dr. Putnam has published widely in the areas of syntactic and morphological theory, research connecting formal linguistics approaches to bi- and multilingual populations, and Germanic and contact linguistics more generally. His work has been published in journals such as Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Glossa, Language, The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, The Linguistic Review, The Nordic Journal of Linguistics, and Syntax.  He is the author of 5 books, including The Structural Design of Language (2013, Cambridge University Press, with Thomas Stroik) and Unbounded Dependency Constructions: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives (2020, Oxford University Press, with Rui Chaves), and editor of several volumes, such as The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics (2020, Cambridge University Press, with B. Richard Page) and Heritage Languages and Syntactic Theory (2025, Oxford University Press, with Roberta D’Alessandro & Silvia Terenghi). Dr. Putnam is affiliated with several research groups and laboratories worldwide and currently enjoys a joint affiliation with the University of Greenwich (UK) as a Visiting Professor of Linguistics.

Dr. Putnam has extensive experiences in serving in various capacities of editorships throughout his career. In addition to serving on several editorial boards for internationally renowned journals and book series, such as Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, and The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, Dr. Putnam has also founded two book series, Open Germanic Linguistics (Language Science Press) and Studies in Germanic Linguistics (John Benjamins Publishing Company), and the Open Access journal, Continua (Penn State University Press). Since 2023, Dr. Putnam has served as an Associate Editor for Language.

Statement 

It is a great pleasure and a privilege to serve our academic community as a reviewer and editor. The process of reading manuscripts, considering suitable reviewers, adjudicating between conflicting suggestions, and reaching an eventual verdict on submitted manuscripts is time consuming, yet incredibly rewarding. Quality peer-reviewed academic journals are a sign of our ability to self-govern our field of inquiry, celebrate and promote new and exciting research in linguistics and language science, and collectively and individually advance our field. I appreciate and understand the immense responsibility associated with the management of a leading academic journal such as Language, and after careful consideration, I am humbled and excited to have been nominated as a candidate for the position of (co-)editor of Language.

My continued success as a scholar requires the maintenance of a broad and open-minded view of linguistics and language science. This fundamental trait is essential not only to sustain a successful research career, but also to serve as a reviewer of manuscripts and as an (associate) editor. The cumulative experience of my editorial responsibilities to date has required that I develop a keen sense of fairness and compassion as a reviewer and editor, while maintaining the integrity of the journal/book series and the peer-review publication process, more generally. Establishing and maintaining strong interpersonal relations with (associate) editors, reviewers, and authors is essential for the growth and success of a journal/book series. These responsibilities as an (associate) editor will enable me to step into the role of (co-)editor of Language with the confidence and experience to ensure the growth and success of the journal moving forward.

My vision as (co-)editor of Language first and foremost is to continue our strong tradition of publishing cutting-edge research in linguistics and related sub-disciplines. In my current role as associate editor for the journal, and with my time working under the tutelage of Profs. John Beavers and Shelome Gooden, one of the key challenges is to maintain the standard that manuscripts targeting publication in Language must be applicable and valuable to a wide range of scholars. One goal I will commit to is to aid prospective authors in shaping high-quality submissions to broaden their reach and relevance beyond their immediate range.
A second goal of my vision for the journal involves a commitment toward further building and promoting our online resources. Areas such as Teaching linguistics and Language revitalization and documentation are beneficial to linguists and language scientists form diverse traditions and backgrounds. I will strive to find additional ways to promote these online resources.
My third goal will be to ensure that Language, through its editorial and publication process, will accurately reflect the mission of the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America and its constituency. To this end, I am interested in exploring opportunities to increase the Society’s and the journal’s social media presence through platforms such as Bluesky Social among others. The announcement of important publications in Language should receive an increased presence on these platforms, which also addresses the second aforementioned goal.

My overall vision for Language is to maintain the high standards that have been well established over the course of more than a century. The goals introduced above are relatively modest, but realistic and achievable during my tenure as (co-)editor for the journal. These goals will benefit the Society, the journal, and my eventual predecessor beyond my own tenure as (co-)editor.
As the flagship journal of the Linguistic Society of America, the publication of research findings, pedagogical suggestions, and review of groundbreaking monographs represents the key functions of Language. The editors and editorial staff of Language must be prudent and responsible stewards of this invaluable resource to our discipline and related fields. I acknowledge this responsibility and will do my best to promote and protect the welfare of this important resource. Although I am aware of the hard work ahead in this commitment to excellence, I will take on these tasks with great joy and excitement. It will be an honor and privilege to serve the Society, linguists and language scientists throughout the world, and our editorial team, reviewers, and prospective authors as the (co-)editor of Language.