LSA Summer Institute: call for course proposals

The 2021 Linguistic Society of America’s Summer Institute will be hosted at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The Institute will run from June 14 to July 9 in the Summer of 2021, and will provide 4 week and 2 week courses in a wide gamut of topics in linguistics. Each 90 minute class will meet twice a week. We anticipate that classes will have between 10 and 30 students in them.

The courses are arranged into three levels: introductory courses (100-level), intermediate (200-level), and advanced (300-level). The introductory courses are aimed at students who have had no, or negligible, exposure to the subject being taught, and the intermediate level courses are intended for students who have had one course in the area. These courses are all 4 weeks long. Advanced courses are in specialized topics and can be taken by students at any level, but the presumption will be that students have enough background in the relevant areas to follow high level material. The Institute’s theme is : Linguistics as cognitive science: universality and variation. The 300 level courses are chosen with that theme in mind.

If you would like to teach a course at the Summer Institute, please email a course proposal to us at lsa-call@umass.edu by May 1, 2020. We won’t have room for all of the courses pitched to us. We will let you know if we can accommodate your course by June 1, 2020. For the instructors of the accepted courses, the Institute will cover the costs of travel, University housing and will provide a small honorarium. Proposals to co-teach are welcome and we expect to be able to cover travel costs for all course instructors (the honorarium will be divided among the instructors).

In your course proposal provide us with the following information:

  1. The target audience.
  2. A Short course description (500 word limit).
  3. A Brief outline of motivation for the course (200 word limit).
  4. An Outline of course topics (or readings), i.e., a sense of its syllabus.
  5. Whether it is a 2 week or 4 week course.
  6. If applicable, the relevance of the course to the Institute’s theme
  7. The course title and instructor(s).

Try to not overlap with courses that have already been planned. You will find these described in the “planned curriculum” page which can be accessed through the menu above.