From What’s Happening in South College, the UMass Amherst Linguistics newsletter:
Lisa Green has accepted our offer of a position. She will be joining the UMass Amherst Linguistics Department faculty next fall. We are very fortunate to have her joining us. Lisa got her PhD from UMass Amherst in 1993. Since then, she has become a premier syntactician and a world-renown expert on African-American English. She has published influential books and articles on the syntax, semantics, and acquisition of various dialects of AAE, and she has applied her skills and insights to problems relating to language instruction, language change, and language preservation. Lisa’s is an exciting, unique research profile.
Lisa Selkirk was highly instrumental in attracting Lisa Green. It was in large part due to Lisa S.’s efforts that we received the necessary backing to establish a Center for African American Language, of which Lisa G. will be the director. The center will receive financial support from the offices of the UMass Amherst Provost and of the Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts. It will support a wide variety of activities — conferences, summer research institutes, post-docs, colloquia, teacher training seminars, and so forth.
As always professor Selkirk has great insights and a strong determination to help important causes in the academic world. I suggest that the African American Centre should extend to the study of North-American French (specially Louisianan) and Creoles of French, which are also closely connected with the History of (former) slaves and their descendants in the whole Hemisphere. It is important to acknowledge that the colonisation process has turned the Americas into a new Africa, the African heritage binding several countries like the US, Belize, Cuba, Jamaica, Brazil, Haiti and so on. The diversity of cultural influences and the multi-lingual character of our Continent are to be both praised and studied, and certainly must be included among top priorities.
February 23rd, 2006, at 9:03 am #