Angelika Kratzer has been selected as a fellow of The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University for the 2012-13 Academic year. The Radcliffe Institute is "dedicated to creating and sharing transformative ideas across the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences." The Fellowship program brings together fifty artists and scholars every year. An excerpt from the bulletin announcing Angelika's selection is below.
Congratulations Angelika!
The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University has selected Angelika Kratzer to be a Radcliffe Institute fellow for the 2012–2013 academic year. Angelika Kratzer is among the 51 women and men who will pursue independent projects in the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences within the rich, multidisciplinary community.
After a highly competitive peer-review process, Angelika Kratzer is among only 5 percent of applicants who were accepted to create a diverse incoming class that ranges from A to V: including anthropologists, chemical engineers, linguists, literature professors, molecular biologists, musicologists, and visual artists.
“As an alumna of the Institute’s Fellowship Program, it is a special pleasure for me to welcome these distinguished individuals to a year of exploration, innovation, and creation,” said Lizabeth Cohen, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. “We expect that each fellow will enjoy a year of profound growth and great productivity.”
Angelika Kratzer is a professor of linguistics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She has been a guest professor in many places around the world and is a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. With Irene Heim from MIT, she is co-founder and co-editor of Natural Language Semantics, a journal that, for the last twenty years, has been a major force in bringing together results from theoretical linguistics with fieldwork-based research on underdescribed languages.
Angelika Kratzer’s area of specialization is semantics, an interdisciplinary field located at the intersection of linguistics, cognitive psychology, logic, and philosophy. Her research is about how natural languages are constructed so as to make it possible for humans to systematically assemble complex meanings from small and simple pieces. Humans talk about mere possibilities: what might have been, ought to be, could be, or should be. Human notions of what is possible, inevitable, likely, or desirable are highly systematic,and this is why they have attracted the attention of mathematicians, logicians and philosophers for more than two thousand years. As a Radcliffe fellow, Angelika Kratzer will write a book showing how talk about possibilities is the result of an intricate interaction between the human language faculty and general cognitive abilities, some of which we share with other species.
The Radcliffe Institute, which is Harvard’s institute for advanced study, has awarded nearly 600 fellowships since its founding in 1999. The complete list of 2012–2013 fellows is online: www.radcliffe.harvard.edu.
