MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) celebrated its 75th anniversary a few weeks ago with a three-day symposium and it wouldn’t be a celebration without linguists, would it? Two of our faculty colleagues, Norvin Richards (PhD 1997) and Elise Newman (S.B. 2016, PhD 2021), and one of our most eminent alums, Jessica Coon (PhD 2010), participated in different panels of the symposium.
Norvin talked about the MIT Indigenous Language Initiative (MITILI), which he leads what it has meant to us as a community, what we have learned about language from it, and what it has meant to its graduates and their communities the communities for which the entire initiative was created in the first place.
Elise, who double-majored in physics and linguistics at MIT, spoke about the moment she realized that languages can be studied in much the same way physicists have studied the rest of the natural world and then exemplified this with her own research discovering and explaining some universals of argument structure.
Jessica, a specialist in Mayan languages (and more recently, Iroquoian as well), spoke eloquently about the paths that her graduate study at MIT opened up for her, some things she has discovered in her fieldwork and theoretical investigations, and the paths that she herself now opens up for others through her own teaching and research.
These were intellectually challenging and often moving events, with talks by our colleagues and friends interspersed meaningfully with talks highlighting all the SHASS fields, followed by unusual and fascinating group discussions and Q&A. Happy birthday, SHASS!