about me

I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. I have previously held visiting appointments in the Linguistics Departments at New York University (2024-25) and UC Berkeley (2020). Prior to joining OSU, I held postdoctoral appointments at the University of Konstanz Zukunftskolleg (2021-22), the Language, Logic, and Cognition Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2021), and the Institute for Language and Information at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (2019-20).

My broad research interests are in semantics, pragmatics (particularly formal and experimental approaches), and reasoning. Recently, my focus has been on the connections between lexically-driven inference and compositional semantics, and in particular on formal approaches to causal dependence in lexical and compositional semantics. My current projects investigate causal reasoning, event structure, and the cognitive representation of causation through the lens of causal language, and its interactions with aspect and modality. My dissertation, Causality, aspect, and modality in actuality inferences, develops a causal analysis of actuality inferences from ability modals, based on a causal analysis of the lexical semantics of implicative verbs. I have also worked on causative verbs, (quantified) exceptive constructions, and conditionals.

I received my PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in September 2019. Before Stanford, I studied at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and received my MPhil in linguistics (specialization in syntax, semantics, and psycholinguistics) in 2013. I completed my B.A. in mathematics (with minors in linguistics and philosophy) from the University of Chicago in 2010.

Monograph. Actuality inferences: causality, aspect, and modality. (Apr 2023, Oxford Univ. Press)