Helen Aristar-Dry


Helen Aristar-Dry is an American linguist who currently serves as the series editor for SpringerBriefs in Linguistics. Most notably, from 1991 to 2013 she co-directed The LINGUIST List with Anthony Aristar. She has served as Principal Investigator or co-Principal Investigator on over $5,000,000 worth of research grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She retired as Professor of English Language and Literature from Eastern Michigan University in 2013.

Education and career

Aristar-Dry graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in English and French from Southern Methodist University in 1967, and received her M.A. in English and linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1973. She received her Ph.D in linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1975, where she wrote a dissertation entitled Syntactic Reflexes of Point of View in Emma.
Aristar-Dry has held appointments at Eastern Michigan University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas at San Antonio, and Auburn University. She was a Fulbright Professor at Universitet i Tromsø in 1989-90. Aristar-Dry has also taught at the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute, the CoLang Institute for Collaborative Language Research, and the Summer School on Computational Linguistics.
In 1991, Aristar-Dry joined Anthony Aristar as the co-moderator of The LINGUIST List, a major online resource for the field of Linguistics. She served as the co-moderator of the LINGUIST List until her retirement in 2013. In 2006, Aristar-Dry became the co-director of the Institute for Language and Information Technology, an autonomous research center at Eastern Michigan University, which consolidated the LINGUIST List and various research projects under one roof until the LINGUIST List moved to Indiana University in 2014.
During her time at LINGUIST List and ILIT, Aristar-Dry oversaw many research projects to improve digital infrastructure for linguistics, including the Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data project; the Dena'ina Archiving, Training & Access project; Multi-Tree; LL-Map; and the Rendering Endangered Languages Lexicons Interoperable Through Standards Harmonization project. She also mentored many linguistics graduate students.

Awards

In 2003, Aristar-Dry was awarded the Linguistic Society of America's Victoria Fromkin Lifetime Service Award, along with Anthony Aristar, for establishing and moderating the LINGUIST List.

Selected grants

Aristar-Dry has served as the Principal Investigator or co-Principal Investigator of numerous federal grants. Some of these include:

Books