Jaime Benheim is joining us as a Visiting Assistant Professor, having recent earned her PhD at Northwestern University with a dissertation titled “High school choice and the social meanings of sound change in Chicago”. Jaime’s research is in sociophonetics, language variation and change, and sociolinguistic cognition. Her work explores the indexical relationships between sounds and social meanings in localized contexts, focusing on the production and perception of place- and ethnically-linked features in Chicago, specifically looking at the ongoing apparent-time reversal of a set of subtle differences in vowel pronunciation known as the Northern Cities Shift. This work breaks new ground by exploring the role that high school types play in the social meaning associations that adolescents form for the features involved in this sound change. This fall she will be teaching two exciting new courses: CLPS 0340 Language and Gender and CLPS 1311 Phonetics

Chaya R. Nove is joining us as a Postdoctoral Research Associate, having most recently been a Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Berkeley working on the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE), which is based on Holocaust testimonies. Her research focuses on sociolinguistics, phonetics, language variation and change, contact linguistics and bilingualism. Her work centers on variation and change in contemporary Hasidic Yiddish spoken in New York (of which she is a native speaker) alongside work on prewar European Yiddish dialects. This fall she will be teaching CLPS 1365 Historical Linguistics.

Please welcome them both to our community!