Michael Putnam Named Outstanding New Associate Professor

Michael Putnam has been named the Outstanding New Associate Professor in the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State. The Outstanding New Associate Professor Award honors a full-time faculty member promoted to associate professor in recent years. Professor Putnam earned his Ph.D. at the University of Kansas. He came to Penn State in 2010 after spending one year as a postdoc at the University of Michigan, one year as a visiting assistant professor at Michigan State, and three years as an assistant professor at Carson-Newman College.

His research seeks to gain further insight into the general cognitive architecture underlying the language faculty. He has authored or co-authored two monographs, more than twenty articles in refereed journals, and over a dozen book chapters. He has also edited or co-edited five books. His second monograph, The Structural Design of Language, co-authored with Thomas Stroik, was published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press.  His research program investigates bilingualism across the lifespan, and explores global varieties of German in contact with other languages and societies. This research, conducted often in collaboration with other scholars and his graduate students, incorporates experimental, formal, and functional methods, with the goal of gaining a better understanding of bilingual cognition and grammar. From a linguistic perspective, the majority of his research focuses on the structure and meaning of language and the connection between these two sub-components of grammar.