Sally Thomason nominated for President-Elect of the Linguistic Society of America
Candidate for Vice President/President-Elect (1-year term, with two additional years on the Executive Committee as President and Past President)
Sarah Thomason (Ph.D. Yale, 1968) is the William J. Gedney Collegiate Professor of Linguistics at U Michigan, where she has taught since 1999. Before that she taught at U Pittsburgh and Yale. She was editor of Language (1988-1994) and has served on various LSA committees, including a stint as a member of the Executive Committee (2001-2003); she has also taught at three LSA Linguistic Institutes (1969, 1993, and as the Hermann and Klara H. Collitz Professor in 1999). Since 1981 she has worked with the Salish & Pend d’Oreille Culture Committee in Montana, compiling a dictionary and text collection; she held an NSF fellowship for this research in 1999-2001. In 2000 She was President of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas. She has served Section Z of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in various capacities, including as chair (1996) and as section secretary (2001-2005). She is currently a member of the international Advisory Boards of the Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Most of her research focuses on historical linguistics (especially language contact) and Montana Salish; her two major books are Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics (with Terrence Kaufman, 1988) and Language Contact: An Introduction (2001).