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Curriculum Vitae

Education

Degree-granting programs

  • 2006 – present: Ph.D. student in Slavic Linguistics and Linguistics, University of Chicago
  • 2006: BA/MA in Slavic Linguistics, University of Chicago

Certificate-granting programs / seminars / institutes

  • Certificate of completion: 27th International Seminar on Albanian Language, Literature, and Culture; Prishtina, Kosovo, August 2008
  • Completion of Intermediate Albanian I and Advanced Mastery Albanian at the Critical Languages Institute of Arizona State University, summer 2008
  • Certificate of completion: 39th International Seminar for Macedonian Language, Literature, and Culture; Ohrid, Macedonia, August 2006
  • Certificate of completion: Medieval Slavic Summer Institute; The Ohio State University, June – July 2006 (courses in Slavic paleography and readings in Church Slavonic texts)
  • Certificate: Azbukum program in Serbian language, level 4 of 4; Belgrade, Serbia, July – August 2005.

Dissertation

  • Title: “Phonological Aspects of Language Contact Along the Slavic Periphery”
  • Expected defense: 5/1/12
  • Theme: language contact along the Slavic periphery within an ecological framework, focusing on phonological phenomena. Case studies are drawn from north Russia and the Balkans to argue that feature selection in language contact can be explained as an optimization process between the competing factors of social prestige, phonological groundedness, faithfulness to the innovating language, and mappability to other local languages.

Teaching

  • First Year Russian (RUSS 10100-10200-10300): 2009-2010, Autumn 2010, Winter 2012
  • Russian through Pushkin (RUSS 10400-10500-10600): 2010-2012
  • Second Year Russian (RUSS 20100): Autumn 2007
  • Fourth Year Russian (RUSS 21002-21102-21202): 2006-2009
  • South Slavic I and II (co-taught with Prof. Lenore Grenoble and Yaroslav Gorbachov) (SOSL 33100-33200)
  • Intermediate Albanian: Summer 2010 at the Criticial Languages Institute, Arizona State University
  • Drill instructorships for Second Year Russian (2009-2010), First, Second, and Third Year Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (2008-2009, 2011-2012), and Fourth Year Russian (2007-2008).
  • Writing intern in Language and the Human (HUMA 17000): 2010-2012
  • Writing intern in Human Being and Citizen (HUMA 12500): spring 2011 – 2012.

Languages

  • Russian: near-native (superior on ACTFL scale)
  • Serbian: near-native (superior on ACTFL scale)
  • Albanian: high
  • Macedonian: intermediate-high
  • Turkish: intermediate
  • Bulgarian: intermediate
  • French: intermediate
  • Hindi: intermediate-low
  • Uzbek: intermediate-low
  • Additional coursework completed in: Georgian, Lak, Romani, Old Turkic; some structural knowledge of Chechen and Aromanian

Reading knowledge of

  • German
  • Old Church Slavonic
  • Old Russian / Rusian
  • Italian

Publications

  • To appear. “The Phoneme /o/ in Opoja Albanian: Albanian-Slavic Contact and the Slavic Jers.” Accepted for publication in the Journal of Language Contact.
  • To appear. “The Development of /th/ and /dh/ in Albanian Diaspora Dialects.” Forthcoming in a festschrift.
  • 2012. “Diachronic and Areal Aspects of Macedonian Hiatus Resolution.” Balkanistica 25:2.19-32. (=Macedonian Matters: Proceedings from the Seventh Macedonian-North american Conference on Macedonian Studies, ed. by Victor A. Friedman and Donald L. Dyer
  • 2011. “Typologies of Literary Grammar: Medieval Slavic and Ottoman Turkish.” The Slavic Forum. http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/theslavicforum/slavic-forum-2011.
  • 2011. Review of Klaus Steinke, Xhelal Ylli. Die slavischen Minderheiten in Albaniens (SMA) 3 Teil: Gora. Canadian Slavonic Papers 53: 636-637.
  • 2010. “When is Orthography Not Just Orthography? The Case of the Novgorod Birchbark Letters.” Forthcoming in the Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society.
  • 2010. “Vowel Harmony Loss in West Rumelian Turkish.” eLanguage, LSA Annual Meeting Extended Abstracts.
  • 2010. “A Formal Approach to XML Semantics: Implications for Archive Standards.” In Proceedings of the International Symposium on XML for the Long Haul: Issues in the Long-term Preservation of XML. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 6 (2010). Co-authored with Quinn Dombrowski.
  • 2006. “Towards a Typology of Participial Development: Evidence from Romance and Slavic.” LSO Working Papers in Linguistics 6 (Proceedings of WIGL 2006), pp. 26-38.

Relevant work experience and service

  • Spring 2010: Student coordinator for Workshop on Language Variation and Change, University of Chicago
  • 2009 – present: Graduate student representative on board of SEESA (Southeast European Studies Association)
  • Student council representative, Balkan Express
  • Spring 2006 –2008: Data compilation for project “Aspectual Pairs of BCS verbs”
  • Spring 2006: Assistant Editor of Leptir Mašna (literary magazine for B/C/S students)
  • May 2005 – 2007: Research assistant with Nada Petkovic (lecturer in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian) (general editing, preparation of glossaries, etc.)
  • Winter 2005 – August 2005: Research assistant, Slavic department (Searchable Database of Medieval Slavic Documents, Prof. Daniela Hristova)

Awards

  • May 2010: Student support grant to attend the 2010 Balisage conference in Montreal
  • April 2010: ACLS travel grant to attend the 2010 annual meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in Vilnius, Lithuania
  • May 2008: FLAS award for summer study of Albanian
  • September 2006: Century Fellowship, University of Chicago
  • June 2006: ACLS grant for summer study of Macedonian in Ohrid, Macedonia
  • June 2006: Induction into Phi Beta Kappa
  • June 2006: George V. Bobrinskoy award from University of Chicago Slavic Dept.
  • June 2005: Order of the October Star award for Russian language from University of Chicago Slavic Dept.
  • April 2002: College Honor Scholarship from University of Chicago
  • May 2002: National Merit Scholar award
  • April 2000: Winner of NY State Olympiada of Spoken Russian

Talks and Presentations

2012     “Language Contact and Change in 19th Century Balkan Turkish.” Workshop on Language Variation and Change, University of Chicago.

“Multiple Relative Marking in 19th Century West Rumelian Turkish.” February 2012: Berkeley Linguistics Society.

“Etymological Markup of the Birch Bark Letter Corpus.” January 2012: AATSEEL.

 

2011     “From Prizren to Novgorod: Slavic and Non-Slavic in Russia and Kosovo.” November 2011: ASEEES.

“Typologies of Literary Grammar: Medieval Slavic and Ottoman Turkish.” May 2011: Slavic Forum, University of Chicago.

“The Dative Absolute in South Slavic.” April 2011: Medieval Slavic Workshop, University of Chicago.

“Language Contact and Change in 13th Century Novgorod.” February 2011: Invited talk, University of California – Berkeley.

 

2010     “Slavic Influence on Turkic Vowel Harmony.” October 2010: Slavic Linguistics Society.

“Baltic Influence on Slavic Spread: the Case of North Russian.” September 2010: Societas Linguistica Europaea.

“Orthography and the Jer Shift in the Birchbark Letters.” April 2010: Medieval Slavic Workshop, University of Chicago.

“An XML-based approach to dialectological data: The development of syllabic liquids in Bulgarian.”April 2010: 17th Balkan and South Slavic Conference. Co-authored with Quinn Dombrowski.

“An Albanian Look at the Jers.” April 2010: 17th Balkan and South Slavic Conference.

“When is Orthography Not Just Orthography? The Case of the Novgorod Birchbark Letters.” February 2010: Berkeley Linguistics Society.

“Vowel Harmony Loss in West Rumelian Turkish.” January 2010: Linguistic Society of America Annual Conference, Baltimore.

2009     “Vowel Harmony Loss in West Rumelian Turkish.” December 2009: Workshop on Language Variation and Change, University of Chicago.

November 2009: AAASS 2009, Boston. Participant in Roundtable “Macedonian Language Contact – From Linguistic League to Diaspora.”

“On Vowel Contraction in Macedonian.” November 2009: 7th Macedonian-North American Conference on Macedonian Studies.

“Albanian-Slavic Contact and the Modeling of Phonological Borrowing.” May 2009: Slavic Forum 2009, University of Chicago.

“Vowel-Zero Alternations in Albanian and Morphophonological Contact.” February 2009: Albanian Linguistics Workshop, University of Chicago.

 

2008     “Albanian-Slavic Contact: Phonetic and Phonological Variation.” November 2008: AAASS 2008, Philadelphia.

“On the development of syllabic liquids in East South Slavic.” April 2008: Slavic Forum 2008, University of Chicago.

2007     “A New Balticism in Old Novgorod?” October 2007: Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Association Conference.

“Ancient Dialect Continua and the North Russian Dialect.” September 2007: 5th Graduate Colloquium of Slavic Linguistics, The Ohio State University.

 

2006     “Early East Slavic Dialect Differentiation: Perspectives and Chronology.” October 2006: 4th Graduate Colloquium of Slavic Linguistics, The Ohio State University.

“Cokan’e and the Velar Palatalizations in the Old Novgorod Dialect.” September 2006: Slavic Linguistics Society.

“On the development of *tъrt groups in Bulgarian.” March 2006: Midwest Slavic Conference, The Ohio State University.

“Towards a typology of participial development: Evidence from Romance and Slavic.” February 2006: Workshop in General Linguistics, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

 

2005     “Active participles in Stefanit i Ixnilat: The evolution of participial forms in a Middle Bulgarian Manuscript.” April 2005: Southeast European Studies Association (SEESA) conference, The Ohio State University.

 

2004     “Ja pridumal … bol’shie goroda: The Music of Brat and Brat-2″ (co-authored with Quinn Carey) April 2004: University of Chicago Slavic Forum.