Laura McPherson, is an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics program at Dartmouth College. McPherson finished her Ph.D. at UCLA in 2014, with the dissertation Replacive grammatical tone in the Dogon languages. Her primary research interests lie in phonology, morphology, and fieldwork/language documentation. She published her first reference grammar, A Grammar of Tommo So, in 2013 based on fieldwork in Mali from 2008-2012.

McPherson’s current research projects include developing an automated computational tool for tonal annotation with Emily Grabowski (ATLAS: Automated Tone Level Annotation System), analyzing the linguistic underpinnings of a xylophone surrogate language, and fieldwork on Seenku (Mande, Burkina Faso) in preparation for her next reference grammar, supported by NSF Documenting Endangered Languages.

About eight times each year, the department hosts colloquia by distinguished faculty from around the world.

For More Information: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html