Katherine R. Russell

Hi! I'm a recent graduate of the PhD program in Linguistics at UC Berkeley. In my dissertation "Nasality in Atchan: Synchrony, diachrony, and typology", I draw on data collected over years of documentation work to thoroughly describe and analyze nasality in Atchan, a Potou language of southeastern Côte d'Ivoire. In fall 2026, I will join the Script Encoding Initiative at Berkeley as a postdoc. 

Before coming to Berkeley, I graduated from Georgetown University with a BA in Linguistics and minor in Turkish. Outside of linguistics, I enjoy reading, taking photos, playing piano, drinking tea, and solving puzzles (crossword, jigsaw, you name it). I also love to travel and have studied abroad in Mexico, Turkey, Finland, Tanzania and Poland. I speak (to varying degrees) English, Spanish, French, Polish, Turkish, Finnish, Swahili, Atchan and Guébie.