Jason Merchant

Jason Merchant is the Lorna Puttkammer Straus Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and Vice Provost for Academic Appointments and Graduate Education at the University of Chicago, as well as Faculty Director of UChicagoGRAD.

Education and career
Merchant earned his PhD in linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1999, and his BA summa cum laude in linguistics at Yale University in 1991. He held postdoctoral fellowships at Northwestern University and the University of Groningen, prior to joining the University of Chicago in 2001. Merchant became Vice Provost in 2018, having previously served as chair of the linguistics department, chair of the department of Slavic languages and literatures, and as deputy dean of the humanities.

As vice provost, he oversees all academic appointments at the University of Chicago, and is responsible for academic affairs. His work has included adjudicating claims of academic misconduct and fraud; he was instrumental in granting a PhD to a chemistry student 48 years after her department failed to support her when her advisor died. He also serves on the University's Scholars at Risk committee, which has brought scholars out of war zones to work at the University of Chicago.

Awards and fellowships
Merchant has been a Fulbright fellow at Utrecht University, a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdiesnt (DAAD) fellow at the University of Tübingen, and an Onassis Fellow at the University of Thessaloniki. In 2012, he was awarded the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and in 2019 the Distinguished Graduate Student Alumni Award from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Research
Merchant is a linguist who has worked on the syntax and semantics of ellipsis, grammatical systems of case and agreement in a variety of languages, and on historical semantics and legal interpretation.

Selected publications

 * The syntax of silence: Sluicing, islands, and the theory of ellipsis. Oxford University Press, 2001.
 * Sluicing: Cross-linguistic explorations. (ed. with Andrew Simpson). Oxford University Press, 2010.
 * Voice and ellipsis. Linguistic Inquiry 44.1, 77-108 (2013).