Emily A. Gasser

Emily A. Gasser is an Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department at Swarthmore College, specializing in Austronesian languages, Wallacea & northwest New Guinea, and language documentation. Her research spans phonology, morphology, typology, and language contact, with a focus on endangered languages and computational phylogenetics. She is currently on sabbatical for the 2025-26 academic year, conducting fieldwork in Manokwari, writing a Wamesa grammar, and developing new courses.

Research Interests include:

• Language documentation and fieldwork in Austronesian and Papuan-speaking regions
• Phonological variation and vowel harmony systems
• Typological surveys of adnominal possession and morphological structures
• Interaction between prosodic features in media speech and socio-phonetics
• Computational tools for historical linguistics and classifier system analysis

Recent publications focus on vowel harmony, prosodic perception, and possessive constructions across Wallacea and Northwest New Guinea. She edits volumes on Austronesian-Papuan language contact and contributes to open-access research initiatives.