Dr. Jane Simpson

Biography

Jane Simpson retired in 2022 and became Professor Emerita at the Australian National University. She majored in Chinese and English literature at ANU and completed her honours in Middle English before obtaining her MA in Linguistics in 1977. Jane spent 10 months in Moscow as an ANU exchange scholar from 1977 to 1978. Her fieldwork began on Indigenous Australian languages in 1979, and she received her PhD in Linguistics from MIT in 1983, focusing on the Warlpiri Lexical-Functional Grammar framework. Following her PhD, she was a Sloan postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and worked on the Warumungu language in Central Australia, where she contributed to language maintenance efforts and established a language centre in Tennant Creek. Jane has also provided consultancies for various Indigenous organizations and worked on land claims in Warumungu. In 1989, she became a lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Sydney, later sharing the Linguistics Society of America's Inaugural Ken Hale Chair in 2005. She moved to ANU in 2011 as the inaugural chair of Indigenous Linguistics and became the head of the School of Language Studies until 2014. In 2014, the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language was established, with Jane serving as its Deputy Director until 2022.

Research Interests