Faculty

Syelle Graves, faculty lecturer; Ph.D., CUNY Graduate Center. Her interests are primarily in sociolinguistics, including language attitudes, rapid language changes, and corpus analysis. She is currently mentoring undergraduate research on documenting Hawaiian Creole English and on language attitudes in Arabic, and serving as program coordinator of the NSF REU Site Intersection of Linguistics, Language, and Culture, at Brooklyn College and Long Island University.

Cass Lowry, graduate teaching fellow; M.A., University of Pittsburgh. He is a Ph.D. student in linguistics at the CUNY Graduate Center, and the lab manager at the Second Language Acquisition Lab. His research investigates bilingual processing using psycholinguistic methods, including event-related potentials and pupillometry.

Ben Macaulay, adjunct instructor; M.A., CUNY Graduate Center. He is a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he was recently awarded a dissertation fellowship. His research focuses on endangered language documentation, prosodic phonology, and the indigenous languages of Taiwan.

Jon Nissenbaum, director of the Linguistics Program; Ph.D. ,MIT. His interests are primarily in syntax and semantics but also in speech production and articulatory phonetics. He wrote his dissertation under Noam Chomsky and David Pesetsky, and received a postdoctoral NIH/NICDC research fellowship at the Voice and Speech Laboratory of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. He has published in journals such as Natural Language Semantics and Linguistic Inquiry and contributed to texts such as The Companion to Syntax (Everaert and H. von Riemsdijk, eds.) and Syntax: Critical Concepts in Linguistics (R. Friedin and H. Lasnik, eds.).

Faculty From Associated Departments

Jillian Cavanaugh (Anthropology), professor and department chair; Ph.D., NYU. Professor Cavanaugh is a linguistic and cultural anthropologist whose interests encompass endangered and heritage languages, the interaction of language, gender and sexuality, and language and media. Her recent book, Living Memory: The Social Aesthetics in a Northern Italian Town, is the result of extensive fieldwork on language shift and change that she carried out in Bergamo, Italy. She also teaches in the doctoral anthropology program at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Natalie Kacinik (Psychology), associate professor; Ph.D., University of California at Riverside. Her research examines cognitive and neural processes that underlie language comprehension and the representation of meaning, with an emphasis on higher levels of language (sentences, discourse, metaphor); other areas of interest involve theory of mind, and pragmatics. Kacinik has published in journals such as Brain and Language, Neuropsychology, and Brain and Cognition, and also teaches doctoral courses at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Susan Longtin (Communication Arts, Sciences, and Disorders), associate professor; Ph.D., CUNY Graduate Center. She is an inaugural member of the CUNY Disability Scholars Group and the Brooklyn College Disability Studies Working Group. Longtin is a founding co-director of the Advanced Certificate Program in Autism Spectrum Disorders, an interdisciplinary, collaborative offering between the graduate programs in speech-language pathology and in special education. She is a licensed, certified speech-language pathologist with extensive clinical experience with both children and adults. She is the co-author of Yoga for Speech-Language Development, published in 2017 by Jessica Kingsley, which examines yoga-based practices as a context for facilitating speech and language development in both typically developing children and those from clinical populations. She has published articles and chapters on a range of topics related to various aspects of autism. Her recent research focuses on bridging the divide between clinical fields such as hers and the interdisciplinary field of disability studies.