Nadine Grimm and Asia Pietraszko Promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure
The Department of Linguistics is proud to announce that two of our esteemed professors, Dr. Nadine Grimm and Dr. Asia Pietraszko, have been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure, effective July 1, 2025.
Dr. Grimm joined the department in 2014 and has since built a strong reputation in her specializations of grammar writing and language documentation. Her work explores the structure of under-described languages, with a particular focus on tone and grammatical systems. Her research draws on extensive fieldwork in Bantu languages of Cameroon, where she has been documenting the language of the Bagyeli "Pygmy" hunter-gatherers for fifteen years. Her work brings together phonetic and phonological analysis with typological perspectives, contributing to a deeper understanding of tone and grammatical structure in under-described languages. She also explores the intersection of language and cognition, investigating color categories in northwest Bantu languages in a longitudinal study. Dr. Grimm serves as the Co-Director of the Grammar and Variation Lab, the Director of the African Languages Research Group, and the Program Director of the Language Documentation and Description master's degree program.
Dr. Pietraszko, who joined the department in 2019, specializes in theoretical syntax and morphology. Her research focuses on clausal architecture and the mechanisms of structure-building, including selection, displacement, and agreement. She draws extensively on data from the Bantu language family, particularly Ndebele, Zulu, and Swahili. As part of a National Science Foundation grant, Dr. Pietraszko has conducted fieldwork in South Africa to support her research on clause embedding in Zulu. This work contributes rich primary data that grounds her theoretical investigations into the syntax-semantics mapping of embedding. Her work offers detailed analyses with implications for broader syntactic theory and cross-linguistic comparison. Dr. Pietraszko serves as the Director of the Field Syntax Lab, and the Director of Undergraduate Studies, contributing extensively to the development of the department’s undergraduate program.
These promotions recognize Dr. Grimm and Dr. Pietraszko’s outstanding scholarship, teaching, and service. We congratulate them both on this significant career milestone and look forward to their continued contributions to the department and the field of linguistics.