On Facebook yesterday, starting with a message from Andrew Garrett (the Berkeley linguist):
— AG: Couldn’t be happier for Leslie Kurke [interdisciplinary scholar of antiquity at the University of California, Berkeley] …, one of the new members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in great company! [among them, CNN newsanchor Anderson Cooper; filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer Ava DuVernay; actor, producer, and humanitarian Danny Glover]
— AZ: And of linguistic interest: in Psychological Science, Mark Seidenberg; and in Literature and Language Studies, Joan Bybee, Carol Padden, and Don Winford. Plus, along with Don at Ohio State, not a linguist but a wonderful colleague, Jim Phelan in English.
… Missed on my first pass, Stanford linguist Chris Manning, elected in the Computer Sciences section.
— AG > AZ: excellent! though I am not married to any of them.
— AZ > AG: Well, yes, and now we must all promise not to refer to you as Leslie Kurke’s husband.
[Personal anecdote warning. In 1992, at a local AmAcad gathering, I happened to be seated next to Don Knuth, who read my name tag and asked if I was related to Elizabeth Zwicky. When I admitted I was her father, he called out to other tech types at the gathering, “Hey! This is Elizabeth Zwicky’s father!” — not a member of the American Academy, but vastly more important in Don’s world than some random linguist. Fortunately, there were Fellows there from Humanities and Social Sciences who actually knew me, so there were plenty of people interested in talking with me.]
Some rather large number of members of the Stanford linguistics department have been or are now Fellows of AmAcad, but the living ones are now geographically dispersed, so I doubt we’ll ever assemble in one place. In any case, Chris Manning is now the youngest of the crew.
Officially, Chris is [take a deep breath] the inaugural [that is, the first] Thomas M. Siebel Professor in Machine Learning in the Departments of Linguistics and Computer Science at Stanford. He’s 59 years old, born in 1965 in Australia, and he got his PhD from Stanford in 1994, with Joan Bresnan — also an AmAcad Fellow — as his adviser. His election to AmAcad is just the latest of many accomplishments, distinctions, and awards, so it pleases me to tell you that he’s also an all-around nice guy.
(And then a final note to say, once again, how much I enjoy writing encomia for living people. It’s one of the perks of my current job.)
April 25, 2025 at 9:27 am |
That list of example 2025 fellows is the one provided in publicity by the Academy; it (deliberately) picks a gay man, a Black woman, a Black man, and a white woman, from a variety of fields of accomplishment, to illustrate the range of the Fellows and also to get in a lick (NOAD ‘a smart blow’) for DEI. The Academy might look stuffy and establishment, but it’s also keenly aware that the personal — which includes not only how we live our lives but also how we pursue our careers — is political.
Today I happen to be wearing my BIG FAG t-shirt, but yesterday it was one of my DEI t-shirts. These are days for Standing Up and Standing Out, and the Academy (through the choices of its existing members) is down with the program.
October 10, 2025 at 12:22 pm |
Hi Arnold, special thanks for looking hard enough at the list of new members to discover me so far from the Language Studies section!
And, wow, having looked up Elizabeth Zwicky, I think maybe we’re the same age….
October 10, 2025 at 12:50 pm |
On the age thing: EDZ is 7 months older than you. Which is to say, the same age.