2026 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 2026. The newly elected leaders will begin their terms at the conclusion of the 2027 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, 2026 – 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, 2026.
 

Statement from the Vice President/President-Elect nominee

Jennifer Cole 

Biography

Jennifer Cole is Professor in Linguistics (2016-present) and Associate Dean of Faculty in Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences (2025-present) at Northwestern University. She received her B.A. and M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan (1982, 1983) and her Ph.D. in Linguistics from M.I.T. (1987). Dr. Cole was on the faculty at Yale University (Linguistics, 1987-1989) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Linguistics, Cognitive Science 1990-2016), where she served as Co-Chair of the Biological Intelligence research theme at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science & Technology (2010-2016).

Service to Linguistics, Social & Behavioral Sciences: Dr. Cole served as elected chair of AAAS Section Z [Linguistics and Language Science; 2016-2017], on the National Research Council Board on Behavioral, Cognitive & Sensory Sciences (2013-2015), and on the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America (2007-2010). She served on the Fellows Selection Committee of the International Speech Communication Association (2020-2023) and on the NSF Advisory Committee for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences. Related to her work on language preservation in Pakistan, she served on the Board of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies (2006-2009).

Service to academic journals: Dr. Cole was the founding editor for the journal Laboratory Phonology (2009-2015), and on the editorial boards for Linguistic Inquiry (1998-200), Phonology (1998-2001), Language (2006-2010), and the Oxford Research Reviews in Linguistics (2012-2014). She serves advisory role to the Editorial Board for the Bulletin of Sindh Studies and the Sindh Journal of Linguistics (2020-present). Dr. Cole was a member of the LSA Committee of Editors of Linguistics Journals (2012-2016) and is a member of the Publications Committee for the Association for Laboratory Phonology (2018-present).

Honors, awards and elected positions: Dr. Cole is founding member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology (2009-present) and elected member of the Acoustical Society of America (2019-present). She was awarded as Research Fellow at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (2017-2018); Mercator Fellow, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (2017-2018); Distinguished Lecturer, International Speech Communication Association (2016-2018).

PhD advising: Dr. Cole has supervised 31 PhD students in Linguistics (25 UIUC, 6 Northwestern), and served as a PhD committee member for another 24 linguistics students and 31 students in other disciplines including Communication Sciences & Disorders, Computer Science, Curriculum & Instruction, Educational Psychology, French, Psychology, Spanish and Slavic.

Research: Dr. Cole’s early research was on the grammatical analysis of vowel harmony and other long-distance dependencies in formal phonology. Her research at the University of Illinois led her to collaborations with cognitive psychologists on spoken language processing, and with an electrical engineer on the use of phonological models of prosody to improve computer speech recognition. At Northwestern University, she collaborates with colleagues in Communication Sciences & Disorders on atypical prosody in clinical populations with autism and dysarthria. In her research on prosody, Dr. Cole pioneered methods of prosodic annotation for large speech databases using crowd-sourcing, and innovative experimental methods using tune imitation for the study of intonation in speech production. Her work combines experimental methods with large-scale observational analyses of natural interactions, in English, Hindi-Urdu, Spanish, French, and many other languages, applying computational and statistical modeling and dynamical systems analysis with acoustic and behavioral data. Dr. Cole’s current research focuses on prosody and its role in conveying information about the structure and meaning of utterances in spoken discourse. Her current collaboration involves colleagues in linguistics, mathematics and philosophy. Dr. Cole has published over 50 refereed articles and book chapters and her research has been funded by US federal agencies (NSF, NIH, ED) and a private foundation (Volkswagen Stiftung).

Statement

I am honored to stand for election to the position of LSA Vice-president and President-elect and excited for the opportunity to serve the institution that has represented our discipline for more than 100 years.

My over-arching goal as President will be to work alongside LSA members and officers to guide the LSA into its future as an organization that is effective in bringing together a community of scholars, educators and practitioners with the shared purpose to build and disseminate knowledge, and to channel the flow of that knowledge outward to the broader society. Historically, the LSA has served these functions through its Annual Meeting, Summer Institute, and its publications showcasing research advances and teaching innovations across subfields, through programming that supports early-career linguists, and through initiatives that broaden our community by welcoming linguists from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Yet the landscape of higher education has changed dramatically in recent years, presenting myriad challenges. Our colleges and universities face growing financial constraints amid shrinking enrollment alongside uncertainty about continued federal support for  social and behavioral science research. We see mounting skepticism about the value of higher education, with students increasingly focused on degrees that will secure a path to employment in a time when technology is reshaping work across job sectors. These pressures impact many disciplines, but when resources that support research, graduate studies and undergraduate teaching are in short supply, competition favors disciplines that are aligned with job growth and those that are considered core to the liberal arts and sciences. How will our discipline fare?

Considering linguistics among other disciplines in the social sciences, these pressures mark a critical moment. But they also present an opportunity. I believe a strategic response can  help preserve our place in higher education by positioning linguistics as central to the scientific, technological and social advances that rest on human linguistic communication. A key part of this strategy is strengthening our connections with allied disciplines engaged with human language to amplify awareness of our work and to stimulate synergistic two-way interactions. As LSA President, I would pursue this strategy through Bridging Linguistics forums where linguists and scholars in other disciplines can come together to share research discoveries, innovative methods and best practices with the goal of forging a shared vocabulary and finding common ground.  A bridging initiative would complement other forms of cross-discipline engagement, such as inter-disciplinary conferences that target specific subfields. A bridging initiative would also complement the Special Interest Group model of LEXING, which links linguists with partners outside academia, by focusing on linking across academic disciplines and with broad participation across subfields of our discipline. Through bridging events as part of LSA core activities, we have an untapped opportunity for broader enrichment across our discipline. One such idea is to hold bridging events at the LSA Annual Meeting and Summer Institute, inviting distinguished scholars and rising stars from allied disciplines to talk about the latest developments and persistent challenges in their discipline, stimulating engagement with linguists interested in expanding their research, teaching or practice across the disciplinary horizon.

My vision for linguistics as an academic discipline is one where our passions within our subfields are met with a commitment to securing the stability and future growth of our discipline at large in the increasingly competitive environment of higher education. My vision for the LSA is as an organization that promotes bridging across subfields, allied disciplines and employment sectors, helping linguists stay informed about our science and its relevance to higher education and societal needs today and in the long term.

Statements from nominees for the Executive Committee

Andrew Carnie

Biography

Andrew Carnie is a Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, where he also has appointments in the Cognitive Science Program, the Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching and Applied Intercultural Arts, and the Joint Program in Linguistics and Anthropology.  From 2012-2022, he was the Vice Provost for Graduate Education and Dean of the Graduate College, where he oversaw day-to-day operations across admissions, graduate student services, fellowships, scholarships, the Graduate Center, and research and set policy for graduate studies at the University. He now holds the honorary title of Dean Emeritus of the Graduate College.  

Carnie’s linguistic research focuses on various topics within the Minimalist Principles and Parameters approach to syntactic theory, including phrase structure, Merge, copular constructions, case theory, word order (especially verb-initial languages), and experimental phonology, morphology, and language documentation. Carnie’s work bridges theoretical syntax and phonology and includes significant contributions to language documentation.  In addition to traditional elicitation and fieldwork, he has pursued experimental studies on Scottish Gaelic and has been building a corpus of transcribed, culturally relevant audiovisual materials in the language with his colleagues. He is the author of numerous articles and the author or editor of 14 books, including his well-known introductory syntax textbook, now in its 4th edition. Carnie’s research group has been the home for seven National Science Foundation Grants on various topics in the Celtic Languages.

Statement

I am honored to have been nominated to the executive committee of the LSA as an at-large member. I have been a member of the Society since I was a graduate student and look forward to the opportunity to give back to the community that has supported me in my professional life.  If elected, I will bring my core values to the executive board. These are diversity and interdisciplinarity, empathic leadership, and community-centered scholarship.
​
Diversity & Interdisciplinarity: I interpret the term ‘diversity’ broadly. For me, this value represents not only strengthening the diversity of scholars who work as linguists but also the diversity of thought that so characterizes our field. While I served as Dean of the Graduate College at UA, I implemented programs that increased the percentage of graduate students from underrepresented groups from 13% to 25%. This involved everything from developing admissions policies that recognized that students from minoritized communities may not come pre-equipped with the same skills as other students to creating special programs to support first-generation graduate students. I was particularly proud of the support we provided to students with Indigenous heritage.

When it comes to diversity of thought, one of my most popular classes is called “Theories of Grammar”, in which we survey a wide variety of approaches to morphosyntax and semantics from functionalist ones to non-Chomskyan generative perspectives. In this class, we also spend a great deal of time talking about the best way to decolonize theoretical work. This commitment to diversity of thought extends to my own research, where I have pursued a broad range of topics, from investigations of minimalist theory to writing a book which documents and describes Irish nominal declensions to experimental phonetics and phonology to developing an audio-visual database of Scottish Gaelic recordings. Prior to my role as dean, I served as the director of Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs (GIDPs) at the university. I was effectively the head of 18 graduate programs that crossed traditional departmental boundaries. As we know, the field of linguistics is not only internally interdisciplinary, but also relies on our connections with other fields, from Computer Science to Anthropology. I always aim to broaden these connections.
 
Empathic leadership, for me, means prioritizing the needs of those with the least. At my institution, like many around the country, graduate student labor continues to be a foundation of our educational mission, but our student workers were living below the poverty line. To remedy this, I worked collaboratively with deans and other administrators across the university to set minimum stipends and support packages tied to the cost of living, which automatically increased with inflation. I also observed an important trend in student success goals: Many doctoral students were primarily interested in pursuing careers outside academia. In 2014, I founded the University of Arizona Graduate Center, which provides professional development training and support for all Graduate Students, including those looking for non-academic careers.
 
Finally, as someone who has spent their working life collaborating with speakers of an endangered language, I have come to value community-informed research. My whole career has been spent balancing my own personal research interests in theory with the needs of the communities I work with. I have seen a shift in my own values, where I now not only emphasize explaining why my more technical research is relevant to the communities I work with, but also highly value the people who have facilitated that work. This means ensuring that my work is freely accessible to them through open access and aligns with their priorities and needs.

Veneeta Dayal

Biography

Veneeta Dayal is Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics at Yale University. She started her career at Rutgers University on the day that the Linguistics Program became a Department. As such, she had the invaluable experience of being part of a team that built a graduate program from scratch. During her time at Rutgers, she served in a number of administrative roles: Undergraduate Director, Graduate Director, Chair, Acting Dean of Humanities. She has taken on administrative tasks at Yale as well. She has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies, Director of Graduate Studies and is currently Chair of the Department.

As Undergraduate Director at Rutgers, Veneeta Dayal collaborated with colleagues to expand the curriculum to better serve student interests, introducing courses in Language and Law, Sociolinguistics, Language of Advertising, as well as in Speech and Hearing. She also developed a capstone course that gives hands-on research-experience to large cohorts of graduating majors.

Veneeta Dayal has (co-)supervised more than 20 dissertations. Her students have gone on to make significant contributions to the field. In 2017, she was awarded the Rutgers Graduate School Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award. She has continued her successful mentorship of graduate students at Yale.

Veneeta Dayal has taught short-term courses in semantics at summer schools in Europe, Russia, India and Africa. In addition to teaching, she also serves on the advisory board of the African Linguistics School, an initiative that seeks to expose students in Africa to current research in theoretical and applied areas of linguistics, free of cost.

Veneeta Dayal’s research focuses on semantic theory, and the interface of semantics with syntax and pragmatics. She has worked on a range of topics: questions and relative clauses; bare nominals and genericity; free choice items; syntactic structure of Hindi.  She typically approaches these topics from a cross-linguistic perspective. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Linguistics and Philosophy, Natural Language Semantics. She has authored two books (Kluwer, Oxford) and co-edited one (Kluwer).

More recently, Veneeta Dayal has engaged in collaboration with non-semanticists on the topic of (in)definiteness. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Interpreting Bare Arguments, published in the Open Handbooks series of MIT Press, can be classified as a theory-driven but theory-neutral guide for relating morpho-syntactic signals (or lack thereof) with meaning in the domain of nominal semantics. This marks a shift in her research practice by explicitly taking insights from formal theories of meaning to linguists working outside the area of semantics. Along the same lines is a co-edited volume on the expression of (in)definiteness in several indigenous languages of South America. This proposal is currently under negotiation for a contract.

Veneeta Dayal has been an Associate Editor for Linguistics and Philosophy. She also serves on the editorial boards of several other journals in the field. For more details see her website.

Statement

LSA: I have been involved with LSA as a student and as an instructor but I have never served in an administrative capacity. I find the prospect of understanding the workings of this organization from a new perspective very appealing. If elected, I pledge to maintain the emphasis on the scientific study of language in the service of all linguists. I believe my administrative experience at a public and a private university positions me well for this task. I will say a few words about how I view my research, teaching and service record as a way of introducing myself.

Research: The impetus behind my research is typically the discovery of empirical patterns that defy standard solutions. My theoretical proposals build on such problems on the view that the pursuit of an explanatory theory is consistent with, indeed dependent on, capturing the richest empirical terrain available to the theorist. At the same time, I also believe that there are advantages to looking at data using a theoretical lens. In a recent project, I collated a set of diagnostics, based on semantic analyses, to explore (in)definiteness across languages. The use of formal semantics as a descriptive tool enabled my collaborators, syntacticians as well as language consultants, to notice new features of their language in some cases, and in some others to see systematic patterns in what otherwise appeared to be a random set of facts.

Teaching/Mentoring: I look for ways to integrate cutting edge research with effective pedagogical initiatives in my teaching, accommodating to the level and preparation of the students in front of me. I consider the training and mentoring of graduate students to be a privilege, because one teaches and learns at the same time. Many students are wary of the formalism employed in semantic theory but I have been successful in getting such students over this fear. Knowing that I started in the PhD with nothing more than basic high school math perhaps helps them feel safe to try out their ideas without fear of being judged.

Another aspect of my teaching portfolio involves introducing semantics at short-term summer schools. The special challenge there is finding a balance between showing students the value of a rigorous formal system, and giving them tools they can use without follow-up courses. Having students map out a phenomenon in their own language, I have found, is an effective way of reinforcing the technical material that necessarily draws on English in these multi-lingual settings.

Successful teaching at the undergraduate level involves some of the same key ingredients, structured syllabi and challenging content. And equally important, perhaps, the ability to convey a passion for the subject matter.

Service: I count myself among those who like administration. I enjoy both aspects of it, thinking of and implementing new opportunities as well as solving problems that inevitably arise even with well-designed systems. Going in without a pre-set agenda has allowed me, in all the positions I have held, to look at existing systems with fresh eyes and from multiple perspectives. I also know that important as it is to identify problems and have ideas for addressing them, it is even more important to build consensus in order to implement those changes.

Nicté Fuller Medina

Biography

Nicté Fuller Medina (PhD University of Ottawa) is currently an assistant professor of linguistics at Louisiana State University.  Prior to that, she was a visiting assistant professor at Swarthmore College (2021-2026), assistant professor at the University of Belize (2017-2018) and Inaugural CLIR Fellow in Data Curation in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library (2018-2021). Dr. Fuller Medina trained in variationist sociolinguistics with a secondary specialization in syntax focused on the structure of multilingual speech. The projects she directs are situated within two complementary research streams: the social life of linguistic structure and the social life of data. The Language Contact in Belize project analyzes Belize Kriol as an autonomous language in contact with Spanish and English as evidenced in the naturalistic speech of Spanish-English-Kriol multilinguals. Her second project, Language Culture and History: Belize in a Digital Age examines the after-lives of linguistic data (the topic of her LSA webinar earlier this year) and aims to create broad equitable access to legacy linguistic data while balancing commitments to open science and community accountability. Engagement with multiple subfields of linguistics (e.g., variationist sociolinguistics, syntax, creolistics) and multiple disciplines (e.g., critical archival studies, data science and cultural studies) exemplify her big tent approach to linguistics as does her globally engaged perspective which she brings to the field. In a similar vein, her commitment to open access publishing and active participation in the local and regional scholarly communities in Central America and the Caribbean signal her commitment to the democratization of knowledge production while aligning with the LSA’s strategic goal to “Expand public awareness about Linguistics through education and outreach.”
 
Dr. Fuller Medina’s experience at two undergraduate institutions has fostered her commitment to undergraduate research. She has supervised undergraduate theses and mentored several cohorts of undergraduate research assistants on her research projects. She advocates for building a more inclusive and expansive linguistics starting at the level of undergraduate research and teaching by broadening pathways for students who choose to advance in linguistics while pointing to a range of professional trajectories in the field. Teaching in the areas of sociolinguistics, Creolistics, multilingualism and decolonial linguistics, she successfully raises the visibility and legibility of linguistics.

Statement

I am delighted to be nominated for an At-Large position on the Executive Committee. Similarly, I am excited about the opportunity to be a part of the current forward-moving momentum of the LSA reflected in new SIGs, new initiatives such as the Language, Conflict and Peace-building Initiative, and the new journal JBLAC among other initiatives. I attended my first LSA meeting in 2010, where I first became a member of CEDL, and my first summer institute in 2013. These opportunities allowed me to establish connections that have remained enduring professional relationships underscoring the importance of access to these spaces and the central role of the LSA for our field. I have served on LSA Open Committees as member and co-chair of the CEDL awards subcommittee and past member of the COILS Excellence in Community Linguistics Award committee. I have gained additional leadership and service experience as a member of the Scholarly Advisory Board of Digital Libraries of the Caribbean since 2019. These roles have strengthened my ability to work across institutional and disciplinary perspectives and given me experience in collaborative leadership and organizational governance, all of which are directly relevant to the work of the executive committee and the challenges they face in leading the LSA.

If elected, I would leverage my globally engaged and transdisciplinary approach to work towards the goals and the objectives of the LSA strategic plan. Among these priorities are: deepening engagement with the broader research and higher education community and developing external relationships that promote reciprocal exchange between linguists and others who share an interest in language. Likewise, I would use my expertise to help address the goals of increasing member participation in the LSA and attracting new members across a range of groups. In particular, as the profession continues to evolve and a growing proportion of scholars hold non-tenure-track positions, I would work to ensure that the LSA remains inclusive and representative of scholars across all appointment types and career stages. Finally, I see expanding public awareness about linguistics, advancing inclusive participation and strengthening relationships with the language communities we work with as integral to the vitality of the field. Such efforts are especially important as we face challenges in a shifting academic landscape and aim to position the LSA as a "big tent" organization. Many of the SIGs and open committees are already engaging with many of these issues and I would strongly support and amplify their work. 

Lauren Squires

Biography

Lauren Squires (she/her) is Associate Professor in the Department of English at The Ohio State University, where she has worked since 2012. Prior to that she was Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington (2011-2012). She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Michigan and her MA in Linguistics from the University of Virginia. At OSU, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in English linguistics, English grammar, sociolinguistics, language and media, and digital media studies. She advises graduate students from across the university whose work aligns or intersects with sociolinguistics.

Active in the LSA since graduate school, Squires has most recently served as Co-Chair of the Committee on Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics (CEDL) (2021-2022) and Co-Chair of CEDL’s Nominations Sub-Committee (2023-2025). She served as Review Editor for Language from 2018-2020 and continually reviews abstracts for the Annual Meeting. She has been a member of the Committee on Linguistic Institutes and Fellowships, the Public Relations Committee, and the Program Committee, and she has served as a Pop-Up Mentor for the Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics. Finally, she has attended numerous Annual Meetings and has been involved with three Linguistic Institutes: attending as a student in 2007 at Stanford, co-teaching a course as faculty in 2013 at Michigan, and co-organizing an NSF-funded workshop in 2017 at Kentucky.

Squires’ research has broadly focused on questions of standardization, variation, and language ideology in English, with a special interest in mediatization as a sociolinguistic mechanism. Her work has examined grammatical processing, computer-mediated communication, pop culture, linguistic discrimination, scholarship of teaching and learning in Linguistics, and more. She has published in varied venues, including her edited volume English in Computer-Mediated Communication and the journals Language in Society; Journal of Sociolinguistics; Journal of Linguistic Anthropology; Journal of English Linguistics; Language, Cognition, & Neuroscience; Discourse, Context & Media; and American Speech.

Statement

I am honored to be nominated to serve as a member of the Executive Committee. As a Lifetime member of the LSA, I believe in the Society’s mission and the fundamental importance of our field to society at large. Linguistics has always been, for me, a way to better understand human beings and human behaviors. This shared interest positions linguists to undertake valuable research that empowers communities; to leverage our expertise to advocate for justice; to educate students and the general public about why language matters; to create tools that improve people’s lives and critique those that fail to do so; to participate in important conversations about what a future world could look like. As I see it, the Society’s role is to offer a structure to push these potentials of linguistics into action, through collaboration and distributed leadership. And the Executive Committee is entrusted with making sure this structure remains solvent, relevant, and responsive to the needs and voices of members.

Having served in several capacities with the LSA already, I welcome the opportunity to step into a position that offers the broadest possible view of the organization. My experience includes committee chairing, committee work, Linguistic Institute teaching, editorship, and reviewing. This service has given me an appreciation of the huge variety of tasks our members and staff undertake, and some of the challenges they face in doing so. I would hope to help ensure that the organization offers sufficient support for all of this critical labor, through our committee structures, resource allocation, mentorship, and consultation. I would also hope to contribute to furthering the strides taken to (re-)affirm the Society’s values and to create programming that aligns with them. Especially in the face of ongoing threats, we must be unwavering in the commitment to protect and empower vulnerable speakers, populations, and community members.

Certain elements of my participation in the LSA have been the most gratifying parts of my career so far. I can’t overstate how much I have learned and grown from serving as Review Editor at Language, co-chairing and working on Nominations with CEDL, and participating in the Institutes. These have been so meaningful because of the amazing colleagues I got to talk to in the course of the work. I have exchanged emails with easily hundreds of linguists (possibly you)! I love how LSA service crosses sub-fields, institutions, and generations. It stretches us to look around, beyond our own knowledge. One of my favorite things to do at the Annual Meeting is pick at least one session to attend whose talk titles I don’t really understand. I like seeing how differently someone else is doing linguistics from how I am—and delight in how vast and yet specialized we are as linguists. The LSA’s programs and publications are the best way to showcase this diversity, and we should always be seeking to go further. As I look at the current leadership team, I see colleagues I have long admired, whom I genuinely trust to move the Society forward. I would count myself deeply lucky to be able to join them in enacting a positive and productive vision for our field.
 

Statements from student nominees

Sasha Boguraev

Sasha Boguraev is a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin, working in computational linguistics and interested in how language models can inform our understandings of both language and cognition. His research area gives him access to many linguists and students who are interested in jobs in both academic and business spaces.

Sasha served as a co-organizer for both the South-by-Semantics Workshop and the Texas Linguistics Society. In addition to organizing, he has also reviewed two conferences. This work shows Sasha’s desire to bring linguists together across multiple institutions, and these connections will help him to engage with student concerns across the LSA membership.

In student facing roles, Sasha was recognized for exceptional service as a TA while an undergraduate at Cornell, underscoring his ability to meaningfully engage with students and navigate their concerns in a useful way.

All these experiences have prepared Sasha to serve as a thoughtful and proactive student representative on the Executive Committee.

Mikaela Belle Martin

Mikaela Belle Martin is a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in experimental sociolinguistics. Within her home department, she has established a strong reputation as an engaged citizen, actively contributing to a supportive and vibrant academic community. 

Beyond her home institution, Mikaela has also worked with the Black Academic Development Lab at Stanford University. She originally joined the lab as a research intern and subsequently returned as a graduate research mentor. This trajectory highlights her deep commitment to supporting and listening to often marginalized voices in linguistics, encompassing both fellow scholars and upcoming students. Further, her experience as a mentor aligns with the LSA’s commitment to welcoming a diverse and global membership.
Through her roles at both institutions, Mikaela has developed the communication and listening skills necessary to serve on the executive committee as an effective student representative. 

Statement from the Secretary/Treasurer Nominee 

Melissa Baese-Berk 

Biography 

Melissa Baese-Berk is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago, where she also directs the Speech Perception and Production Laboratory. She earned her PhD in Linguistics from Northwestern University and her BA in Linguistics from Boston University. Prior to joining the faculty at University of Chicago, she was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Oregon.

Prof. Baese-Berk’s research focuses on laboratory phonology, phonetics, and psycholinguistics, specifically examining speech perception and production. Her lab conducts behavioral experiments in these domains along with acoustic-phonetic analyses of speech. She has published extensively in a variety of journals and has served as an editor at journals in linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science. The work in the lab is currently funded by several grants from the National Science Foundation and an Opportunity Award from the James S. McDonnell Foundation. In 2021, she was awarded the UO’s Faculty Excellence Award, the highest research award given to faculty at the institution. Prof. Baese-Berk is also a committed teacher and mentor. She enjoys teaching across the curriculum but especially enjoys teaching introductory and core education courses to students just discovering linguistics. She was awarded several teaching and mentoring awards at UO including the Tykeson Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the Ersted Faculty Achievement Award for Distinguished Teaching, the Rippey Award for Innovative Teaching, and the Faculty Research Mentor Award.

Prof. Baese-Berk has been a member of LSA since she was an undergraduate student and has served on several committees and working groups in recent years. The bulk of her service to the field has been through the Committee on Gender Equity in Linguistics (COGEL), where she served as chair from 2018-2020, and as co-chair from 2024-2025. While chair, she was one of the founders of the Pop-Up Mentoring Program which was recognized with the Linguistic Service Award in 2019. She also served a three-year term as a member of the Executive Committee.

Statement

I am honored to stand for election for the as the next Secretary-Treasurer of the Linguistic Society of America. I care deeply about this Society and the mission to advance the scientific study of language. However, the LSA has faced many challenges in the past several years, some external to our Society and some derived from within. While the Society has weathered many of the challenges it has faced, others have had a more lasting impact, especially on our financial status as an organization. Having recently served as a member of the Executive Committee, I am intimately familiar with these challenges and recognize the urgency with which we must overcome them.

From my perspective the most critical challenge we face as a Society is shoring up our financial status, such that we can continue operating as a Society and an intellectual home for linguists for years to come. To do this, we will need bold and creative visions for potential solutions. While I certainly have my own perspective on steps we can take, I most look forward to the opportunity to talk to members and work collectively to move forward as a Society.

As part of my plan for this role, I would work to increase transparency of the decisions the Executive Committee makes on a variety of issues. I believe that the bulk of the frustration felt by many members stems from a lack of transparency about what decisions are made and why they are made. Too many linguists refer to the LSA as an outside entity, as in “their decisions” or “how they run things”, when, in reality, the society is “us”, a collective of all of our scholarly and outreach efforts. Although the Executive Committee and officers are elected to serve as the representatives of the membership, it is not the case that all decisions ought to be made in a vacuum, without input or explanation. Increased transparency will help members understand why and how we are making decisions. My hope, however, is that it will also open opportunities for collaborative problem solving with the membership taking an active role in propelling us into an era of more financial stability and more openness to the involvement of linguists from a variety of backgrounds and interests.

I would be honored to serve as the Secretary-Treasurer of the LSA. If elected, I am confident that I would be a strong advocate for our members. Having worked across many areas of the society, I hope I have built trust such that the membership would feel comfortable in reaching out to me with questions, concerns, and ideas for helping us improve the membership experience for all linguists.