Claire Bowern

Claire Bowern is Associate Professor of Linguistics. Following graduation from Harvard University in 2004, she spent four years in Rice University’s Department of Linguistics before coming to Yale in 2008. Her research focuses on the languages and history of Indigenous Australia. She has been working with speakers of endangered, Indigenous languages since 1998, both through fieldwork with the last speakers of several languages from Northern Australia and through archival work with historical records, ranging from the 1770s to the mid 1960s. Her work combines traditional methods of language documentation and reconstruction with computational methods more familiar from work in biology. She is associate editor at Language and Diachronica, past chair of the Linguistic Society of America’s Ethics Committee, and a current LSA media liaison. Her work is funded by the National Science Foundation.