The faculty members in the Department of Linguistics are highly active in research and are prominent in their respective fields. The Department was recently ranked #1 in the nation in the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index (Chronicle of Higher Ed., 1/12/07). In a recent 5 year period the faculty published more than 90 articles in peer-reviewed journals, such as Linguistic Inquiry (13), Cognition (8), and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2), gave hundreds of presentations at conferences and invited colloquia, and generated $1-2 million per year in external research grants. Department faculty have published 11 books in the past 8 years. Much of this research involves collaborations with students.
The department is especially proud of the research accomplishments of its students, which have increased dramatically in recent years. In a recent 3-year period the graduate students produced around 50 journal articles (published or submitted), 85 book chapters and conference proceedings papers, and 220 refereed and invited presentations. The students also received numerous awards for their research, including Graduate Fellowships and a research grant from the National Science Foundation, plus fellowships from a number of international organizations. The department now has an unusually strong record of student research achievements.
If you'd like to see what our students have been up to in the last few years, their work can be seen in a recent List of Student Publications and Awards.
Graduate student success has led to equally dramatic gains in job placement for graduates of the program. In the past 8 years almost 90% of the department's PhD graduates have been placed in academic jobs in research and/or teaching after graduation, and the department's graduates have been very successful in obtaining competitive tenure-track positions in research universities. Recent graduates from the program include faculty at such institutions as the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, University of California, Santa Cruz, Columbia University, McGill University, University of California, Irvine, Northwestern University, the University of Kansas, Baylor University, and the University of Bristol (UK). A number of graduates have secured postdoctoral research positions at such institutions as University College London, Harvard University, the University of Edinburgh, MIT, Stanford, CalTech, and Utrecht University, including two winners of prestigious Marie Curie Fellowships.