Diana Archangeli

Diana Archangeli has been a member of the faculty in the Department of Linguistics for nearly four decades, and her retirement and change to Professor Emeritus in 2023 marked the end of an era in the department. Dr. Archangeli joined the University of Arizona in 1985, one year after obtaining her PhD from MIT based on work on underspecification in phonology that positioned her as a leader in the field. Dr. Archangeli’s work quickly became central to the field and was being taught in every graduate Introduction to Phonology course as something one had to understand and be able to use in one’s own analyses. After many years of being a leader in formal phonology, Dr. Archangeli pushed herself to new areas, obtaining funding to develop a new lab for ultrasound analysis of speech, and developing methods for better analysis of ultrasound data of the tongue (a challenging task because of the lack of solid reference points). After that, she also retrained herself for language documentation of little-studied languages in the field. This is a remarkable record of innovation throughout her career. Recently, she also developed a new theory of formal phonology, Emergent Phonology.

Within the University of Arizona, Dr. Archangeli has held the positions of Associate Dean of SBS, Director of Graduate Studies of Linguistics, Director of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Institute, and many other important functions. As Linguistics Director of Graduate Studies, she took an exceptionally active role to build systems and procedures that benefit graduate students and facilitate progress toward degree and job placement. She took the initiative to seek out new ways to benefit graduate students at every turn. The high quality of her graduate-level teaching in courses is famed within the department. During her time as Director of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Institute, she created helpful programs to mentor junior faculty on grant-writing. Dr. Archangeli has supervised many Ph.D. students over the course of her career, providing the guidance they needed, and these students have gone on to successful careers in academia and industry.