Hans C. Boas

Joint presentation “Turning migrant letters of the 19th century into speech” at the 50th Symposium of the Society for German American Studies, Columbus, Ohio (Hans C. Boas, Joren Somers, Atiba Pertilla, Thomas Schmidt, Margo Blevins, et al.)

This week, I’m co-organizing (with my colleague Atiba Pertilla) a workshop on Listening to the Past: Digital Approaches to the History of Sound and Language at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. Together with Thomas Schmidt and Margo Blevins we are presenting the first results from our on-going research project on reconstructing 19th century spoken Texas German (sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation).

This week I gave an invited plenary talk at the 5th Constructionist Approaches to Language Pedagogy (CALP-5) conference in Tromso (Norway): Towards an Empirical Pedagogical Construction Grammar: Observations, Insights, and Challenges.

This week, I’m hosting my colleague Verena Sauer (University of Vienna) at UT Austin. She is giving a talk on “Texas German in the minds of its speakers” on Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2026, from 4-5 p.m. in BUR 337. All are invited to attend!

This week, I’m hosting my colleague Amir Zeldes (Georgetown University) at UT Austin. On Jan. 29, 2026, he will be giving a talk on “From Desert Monasteries to Digital Corpora: Quantitative Research on Coptic in the Age of AI.”