We would like to welcome new faculty members who are joining our department in a faculty role for 2026. Let's meet these new additions to the department!
Anastasia Tsilia - Assistant Professor
My research lies at the intersection of formal semantics, pragmatics, and the syntax–semantics interface. After studying philosophy, logic, and cognitive science, what drew me to linguistics was the use of logic and other rigorous tools to model linguistic representations in the mind. Much of my work examines how languages encode temporal relations, attitudes, expectations, and sources of information. More specifically, I have worked on tense, evidentiality, negation, exclamatives, and complementation. My recent work focuses especially on the meaning of exclamatives and the role of negation in their interpretation. I particularly enjoy investigating these phenomena cross-linguistically and asking what remains constant and what varies across languages. I am also interested in how spoken language interacts with co-speech gesture and how gestures contribute to meaning and communication. This fall, I will be teaching LING/PHIL 507: Formal Semantics I.
Amy Yuiko Atiles - Teaching Assistant Professor
I am a researcher in second language acquisition, with a particular interest in how instructional techniques that prioritize input processing can facilitate or hinder learners’ progress. I use a combination of psycholinguistic and judgment tasks to assess the effects of different types of language instruction.
I received a BA in Linguistics from the University of Iowa, an MA in Applied Linguistics for Language Teaching from the University of York, and an MA and PhD in Linguistics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I have experience teaching English in the Japanese public school system, as well as at the community college and university levels in the United States.
This fall, I am teaching LING 225 (Language, Mind, and Brain) and LING 490 (Statistics for Linguists).
We hope you join us in wishing these faculty members a warm welcome!