Congratulations to our recent alum, Zack Jaggers, who has been selected to receive this year's Dean's Outstanding Dissertation Award in the Social Sciences from GSAS.

His dissertation, A combined sociolinguistic and experimental phonetic approach to loanword variation and adaptation, examines the variation of foreign word pronunciations with respect to political ideologies related to globalism and nationalism, how those same ideologies influence sound processing at the early stages of a foreign word's entry into a new language, and how foreign word pronunciations impact listeners' perceptions of a speaker.

Zack has recently discussed his research in venues intended to be accessible to the public, such as his visit on the Tell Me Something I Don't Know podcast(episode 28: winning contestant) and his presentation for the Five-Minute Linguist at the 2018 annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (runner up).