You’re here because you’re curious about: research.
I’m a linguist by training. I studied linguistics and classics (Latin and Ancient Greek) at New York University.
I wrote a senior honors thesis on Bulgarian phonetics for my studies at New York University [read this here; I received high honors for this], and presented a project on Bulgarian question syntax at Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 33 [read a draft of this paper here; this is currently in submission to the Journal of Slavic Linguistics].
Me at my various presentations.
Featured in clockwise rotation, left to right: Gary Thoms [on screen], Miloje Despic,
Dhruv Barot, Laura Phelan, Owen Walor, Sarah Murphy, Estefania Chinchilla,
Ruohan Zhou, John Bailyn, Catherine Rudin.
Photos: Stephanie Harves.
My research mentors for these projects have been:
In my regular course of study, I have analyzed Khmer (Cambodian), the interaction of Middle Welsh and Latin in Welsh hagiographical texts (this project is in progress, slowly!), and Spanish-English and Russian-English bilingualism in New York City census data. In my classics studies, I’ve read selections of Catullus, Tacitus, Vergil, Horace and Homer. The work I’m most proud of here is an analytical paper on Tacitus’s portrayal of Nero in the later Annales, in which I argue that Nero is not evil, but childish. It’s out there! But it’s well-argued.
At New York University, I won numerous academic awards, both for specific academic achievements in linguistics and classics and for broad academic excellence university-wide.
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But Jules, why should I care about your academics?
Because, dear reader, these experiences play crucial parts in how I craft writing. My studies in linguistics taught me detailed systems of phonetics, so I can pinpoint specifically what sound is making a sentence sound bad. I learned how to resolve syntactic and semantic ambiguity. I’ve also literally used this in my reporting. My studies in classics are of famous works in ancient languages—that’s how I learned to structure a story. Because the poems and histories I read were in languages I don’t speak natively, I had to work harder to understand what each element is doing to fit into the larger arc. That gives me a stronger foundation in crafting narrative. (Plus, using Ancient Greek oral epic poetry techniques, I can tell a killer bedtime story. …You probably can’t hire me to do this.)