Teaching & Learning Discussion: Mentoring Graduate Student Writers

Jim Wood

Jim Wood received his Ph.D. from New York University in 2012. His research revolves around issues of syntactic theory and its interactions with semantics and morphology, with a special empirical focus on Icelandic and dialect variation in English. His work on Icelandic covers a wide range of phenomena, much of which revolves around issues of case marking and verb phrase structure (causatives, passives, middles, argument structure, dative-nominative constructions), but also includes the structure of noun phrases, interpretation of pronouns, and the syntax of clitics. In 2012, he came to Yale and took on a leading role in the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, which focuses on “syntactic microvariation” in English—tiny differences between dialects of English. In this area, he has worked and published on the syntax of numerous constructions, and he has been developing new ways of investigating, mapping, and quantitatively analyzing syntactic dialect variation.  Since 2013, he has been the Associate Editor of the Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, and his research has been published in a wide range of journals, including Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, Syntax, Journal of Linguistics, Linguistic Variation, American Speech, Glossa, and Lingua, among others. He is an ongoing member of the Linguistic Society of America, the American Dialect Society, and Íslenska málfræðifélagið (the Icelandic Linguistic Society).

Sunny Xiang

I study and teach race, war, and empire through wide-ranging aesthetic, cultural, literary, and documentary materials. I am particularly interested in the methodological questions and perceptual challenges introduced by U.S. military empire in Asia and the Pacific during the mid-twentieth century. For example, in my first book Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War (Columbia University Press, 2020), I track the visual and narrative crux of Oriental inscrutability in relation to U.S. cold war intelligence operations. My current project, Chemical Apophenia: Air Conspiracies and Skin Connections in the Toxic Tropics, explores how U.S. WWII military science in the Pacific theater generated new paradigms for detecting and combating toxicity in the air -and on the skin. In understanding war, empire, and science as not only structures of power but also regimes of perception and styles of knowing, my scholarship shows how aesthetic and cultural approaches can create surprising conversations across Asian American studies, Pacific studies, critical militarization studies, and feminist science studies.

My research can be found in journals such as ASAP/Journal, Radical History Review, Post45, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias. Recent classes I have taught include War and Everyday Life, Readings in Comparative World English Literatures, and The Teaching of English.