We are deeply grateful to our colleague Danny Fox, who has agreed to serve as the next Head of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy from July 1. Danny is the Anshen-Chomsky Professor of Language and Thought and is a renowned pioneer and intellectual leader of the field. His research includes solutions for some of the deepest problems in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and the relation of the human faculty of language to other aspects of human cognition and reasoning. Danny received his PhD from MIT in 1998 and from 1998 to 2001 was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He has been a member of our faculty from 2001, and also served as the founding director of the Language, Logic and Cognition Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
We want to take this moment as well to offer an especially deep note of thanks from the bottom of our hearts to Kai von Fintel, who concludes his term as Linguistics Section Head, and to our Philosophy colleague Alex Byrne, our department Head for the past three years. You have both served our community brilliantly and creatively through this terrible, overwhelmingly stressful pandemic period — a level of commitment no one could have anticipated demanding, and which you surely did not sign up for. We are profoundly appreciative.
(For those of you who might be wondering: by tradition, the leadership of our joint department alternates between the Linguistics and Philosophy sides. This has been our tradition since the founding of the department in 1976, and it works very well!)