Sarah Murray

Sarah Murray is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Cornell University, affiliated with the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIISP), Cognitive Science, and Philosophy. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Rutgers University (2010) with a Certificate in Cognitive Science.

Her research focuses on crosslinguistic semantics and pragmatics, particularly in understudied Indigenous languages like Cheyenne. She directs the Cornell Language Documentation Lab and collaborates with the Cheyenne community in Montana on language revitalization since 2006. Her work combines formal theories with empirical fieldwork, emphasizing methodology for semantic elicitation and documentation.

Murray teaches courses including Native American Languages, Pragmatics, and Field Methods. She has received the Klarman Fellowship and led NSF-funded projects documenting Cheyenne texts. Her research spans evidentiality, speech acts, and dynamic semantics, with publications in top journals like Semantics and Linguistic Theory and International Journal of American Linguistics.

Her grants include seed funding for social science research and community-based language projects. She actively engages in outreach, presenting at conferences worldwide and mentoring students in linguistic fieldwork.