30.1184, Staff Letter: Sarah Robinson

Thu Mar 14 20:30:17 UTC 2019

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-1184. Thu Mar 14 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.1184, Staff Letter: Sarah Robinson

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Student Moderator: Jeremy Coburn
Managing Editor: Becca Morris
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Everett Green, Sarah Robinson, Peace Han, Nils Hjortnaes, Yiwen Zhang, Julian Dietrich
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
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Editor for this issue: Sarah Robinson <srobinson at linguistlist.org>
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Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2019 16:29:48
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Staff Letter: Sarah Robinson

Dear LINGUIST List readers,

My name is Sarah, and I’m on the Pubs Team–I manage journals, journal calls
for papers, TOCs, summer schools, academic papers, and dissertations. We may
have met through email, or you may have read some of my blog posts about nerd
stuff on the LL blog. You may even recognize that introduction from my letter
last year (sorry, I still have the same job.) I'm also cross-trained in jobs
and conferences and can jump on those editorial areas if other editors are out
for the day.

I’ve worked at the LINGUIST List (henceforth: LL) for a couple years now, and
it's been an awesome opportunity. LL has been instrumental to my academic
career in the form of funding--I came to my graduate program unfunded and
tripled my student debt in less than a year. I got a graduate assistantship
from LL in my second year and it basically saved me from having to drop out
because of sheer financial pressure. What I mean to say is that LL is
providing opportunities to graduate students like me who might otherwise have
no way to participate in academia, and has been doing so for years.

I earned my MA last year in General Linguistics from Indiana University,
Bloomington, LL's host institution, and am now a member of the PhD program in
the Linguistics Department at IU, as well as doubling in the Germanic Studies
Department. Since starting my graduate program, I've been able to study Old
Norse, Icelandic, Old High German, Old English, German, Gothic, ancient
Germanic literature and philology, (can you tell I have a bit of a thing for
historical linguistics and dead Germanic languages?), as well as branching out
into Cognitive Science, in particular the intersections between cognitive
linguistics, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistics. It's a pretty broad
range of topics, but the overlaps in subjects have made it possible for me to
specialize in a really particular niche as well as building a strong
background in a range of linguistic studies.

LL provides a specific and indispensable opportunity to its editors--since we
interact with scholars all over the world in a huge range of specializations,
and since our job involves functionally acting as a middle man for the
fire-hose of academic literature and publications, we get a birds-eye-view of
the trends in current linguistics in a wide range of specializations and
subfields.

LL handles thousands of submissions and a gigantic amount of data day-to-day,
and there's only a handful of graduate students working diligently to keep our
30,000 subscribers up-to-date on linguistic publications, job opportunities,
conferences where they can submit their research, and much more, as well as
doing the hairy work of filtering predatory publishers and conferences that
are likely to hurt academic careers more than help them. And it's not just
editors who work so hard to support the global linguistics community around
here--keep an eye out for our WebDev team's "fun facts" series on Tuesdays to
learn more about all the services LL provides.

When you support the LINGUIST List, you support the mission the LINGUIST List
stands for–the cause of creating a global linguistics community, a place to
share knowledge and find resources–but you also support students like me, who
wouldn’t otherwise be able to be part of it.

Thanks for donating! (here: https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/) 
All the best from me and the LL Team! 
-Sarah

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LINGUIST List: Vol-30-1184	
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