My favorite aspects of linguistics are teaching and doing problem sets. Sadly, after you get your master's, no one gives you problem sets any more, but at least I still get to teach. So far I've GSI'd for Ling 100: Intro to Linguistics (in Fall '06 with Andrew Garrett) and Ling 115: Phonology and Morphology (in Spring '07 with Larry Hyman). This fall I'm teaching Ling R6: Linguistics Writing Workshop. My goal for the future is to teach at a liberal arts college with no separate lingusitics department so that I can teach a wide variety of classes.

The kind of linguistics that I'm interested is called "model theoretic linguistics." Well, it's only called that by me and David Mortensen, but I'm hoping it will catch on. My goal is to gather top-notch data, and then make generalizations about it, using different theoretical models as a tool. I have no interest in finding out what's "right" or "true" about the human language faculty. Different theoretical models have different strengths and weaknesses, and different emperical coverages, that's all. I think it's better to use the one that is most amenable to your data and most convenient for your working-style, rather than drinking the Kool-Aid of any one theory (although sometimes it can be pragmatic to work with the most widely accepted models).

I don't exactly have a specialization yet, because anywhere there are abstractions to be made, I'm interested: phonology, syntax, morphology and historical. What I don't like is the interface between linguistics and reality (cognition, usage, etc), so I steer clear of pragmatics, sociolinguistics, phonetics, discourse analysis, cotnitive semantics, neurolinguistics, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, etc.

I used to pride myself in being a linguist who hated learning languages, but I'm in third year Japanese right now and its kind of awesome. I also know French, and I've briefly studied Classical Greek and Classical Tibetan. I've never done any fieldwork and sincerely hope I never need to, but I'd love to find some speakers of any of the Aslian langauges to do elicitation because there is amazingly cool morphophonology going on in Aslian.

Since I don't like doing research and writing, I think it's important to contribute in other ways, like organizing events and participating in groups:

• Identity in Ellipsis Workshop (co-organized with Maziar)
• Syntax Reading Group (dreamed up with Maziar)
• BLS 32 (organized invited speakers and abstracts)
• WCCFL 26 (co-organized with Maziar)
• LSA 2009 Summer Institute, if Andrew will let me be involved if any way
• Student rep to the faculty meetings (with Shira), '06-'07
• Danish VPX group (with Line, Michael and Maziar)
• Phorum, Syntax Circle