Claire Bowern

Career

Bowern received her PhD from Harvard University in 2004, under the advisement of Jay Jasanoff and Calvert Watkins. Her dissertation was about Bardi, a Nyulnyulan language, and its verbal morphology, both diachronically and synchronically. In 2007, the NSF/NEH awarded her a grant to study Bardi texts from the 1920s. The thesis also included a sketch grammar of Bardi, as well as the first attempted reconstruction of Proto-Nyulnyulan.

She is the author of two widely used linguistics textbooks, Linguistic Fieldwork: A Practical Guide and An Introduction to Historical Linguistics.

Chirila

At Yale, Bowern founded the Contemporary and Historical Reconstruction in the Indigenous Languages of Australia database (Chirila), through the Yale Pama-Nyungan Lab. The name for the database was inspired by both the motivations of the project and the word for "echidna" in many Western Desert languages, tyirilya. Bowern's interest in the historical linguistics of Australian languages has directed the lab to collect lexical data for a more thorough accounting of the composition of the Pama-Nyungan language family.

Service

Since 2015 she has been the vice president of the Endangered Language Fund.

As of March 2022 Bowern is on the editorial review board for the following publications:

• Language Dynamics and Change (editorial board)
• Diachronica (executive editor)
• Transactions of the Philological Society (editorial board)
• Routledge Studies in Historical Linguistics (series editor)
• EL Publishing (advisory board)
• Conceptual Foundations of Language Science (editorial board)

Bowern was previously an associate editor of Language, specifically responsible for the historical linguistics and language documentation areas from 2012 to 2016.