Divisional Dean of Humanities
As interim divisional dean, acting on authority delegated by the Dean of Arts and Sciences, Richard Wright supervises the departments, centers, and other units and programs administratively located in the College’s Humanities Division. He broadly supports those units in their teaching, research, and service, and represents them with respect to personnel matters such as faculty hiring, promotion, retention, merit determination, and the awarding of sabbaticals.
Wright, a UW professor of linguistics, specializes in phonetics, language documentation, spoken-language technology, and hearing sciences. His research and teaching engage in a transdisciplinary approach where the Humanities intersect with the Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He has published one edited book and more than 70 articles and book chapters in areas ranging from computer science and electrical engineering to philology, linguistic theory, and neuroscience and human cognition. He is a highly sought-after speaker, delivering numerous keynote addresses and invited talks at universities and conferences across North America, Europe, and Asia. In the past five years, his research has covered 66 languages from 10 language families. He has held grants from agencies and industrial partners, including IBM, NIH, NSF, and SSHRC. Since joining the UW in 1998, he has directed the Linguistic Phonetics Laboratory, chaired 17 PhD committees, and served as a reader on 44 PhD committees.
Richard received his BA with honors in French and African studies from Michigan State University in 1986. While there, he was a National Merit Scholar and received Title VI and Fulbright-Hays fellowships. Following that, he was a Peace Corps Volunteer in secondary education in Kenya from 1986 to 1988. He received his MA in 1993 and PhD in 1996 in Linguistics, specializing in Phonetics, from UCLA. While there, he held a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship in the Humanities and was awarded an NSF DDRIG grant and a UCLA Dissertation Fellowship. Before joining the Linguistics Department at UW, he was an NIH postdoc in cognitive science at Indiana University. He is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and has editorial positions at several linguistics journals. Richard is deeply committed to the Humanities, and his preparation for the deanship includes an 11-year term as Linguistics Department Chair.