I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz-Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin, Germany. I work in the ERC project Speech Acts in Grammar and Discourse (SPAGAD) under the direction of Manfred Krifka. Before that, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland - College Park, where I collaborated with Valentine Hacquard, Jeffrey Lidz, and Alexander Williams. I completed my PhD in the Department of Linguistics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada under the supervision of Michael Wagner, Bernhard Schwarz, and Luis Alonso-Ovalle.

Besides research, I enjoy teaching, advising, and helping to foster the intellectual life of my local linguistics community via reading and presentation groups. My favorite moments at work are spent with others, engaged in careful thought aimed at getting a little closer to the truth.

Beyond academia, I like to spend time with my wife, Rebecca Fishow (author of The Trouble with Language). We like to go hiking and to visit friends (see below). I also like making things. In the past, I wrote a lot of songs, and sometimes I still do. Lately, I have been trying my hand at writing fiction. If I ever publish anything, I’ll link to it here. To me, making linguisticky artifacts (articles, slides, handouts, posters, experiments) is on a continuum with making more purely aesthetic artifacts (songs and stories). They are produced in service of different goals, but both require time and attention, and lots and lots of revision according to your intuitive preferences. For a nice way to think about intuitive aesthetic preferences, see George Saunders’s forehead mounted “Positive/Negative meter”.


Backpacking in the Dolly Sods Wilderness in West Virginia