Congratulations, Dr. Arsenault and Dr. MacLeod!

We've had a busy summer of thesis defenses! Following the two syntax/morphosyntax thesis defenses earlier this summer, we've had two phonology/phonetics thesis defenses.

At the end of July, Paul Arsenault successfully defended his thesis entitled "Retroflex Consonant Harmony in South Asia". His thesis was supervised by Keren Rice, and the other members of his committee were Elan Dresher, Yoonjung Kang, Alexei Kochetov, Peter Avery (York University) and Gunnar Hansson (UBC). Paul has been working as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Tyndale University College in Toronto (http://www.tyndale.ca/person/paul-arsenault) and will continue his appointment there in September. Paul will be teaching courses on Introduction to Linguistics, Morphology, Introduction to Phonological Analysis, and Advanced Phonology.

Last week, Beth MacLeod also successfully defended her thesis entitled "The Effect of Perceptual Salience on Phonetic Accommodation in Cross-Dialectal Conversation in Spanish". This was momentous for both Beth and her supervisor, Yoonjung Kang, because Beth's thesis is the first PhD thesis that Yoonjung has supervised. The other members of Beth's committee were Laura Colantoni, Alexei Kochetov, Jack Chambers, Keren Rice, and José Ignacio Hualde (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Beth is starting a 2-year appointment at Carleton University in September, where she will be teaching courses on Phonetics, Phonology, Spanish, the Structure of Spanish, Introduction to Hispanic Linguistics, and Topics in Spanish Linguistics. Beth will also be joining OttawaBabel
(http://www.ottawababel.com/), one of the offshoots of TorontoBabel (see http://utlinguistics.blogspot.ca/2011/10/toronto-babel-in-star.html).

Congratulations to both Paul and Beth!