Eastern, Slavic, and German Studies Faculty

Christopher Geissler

Visiting Assistant Professor, Linguistics

Department

Profile

Chris Geissler is a phonetician and phonologist with particular interests in speech production, the phonetics-phonology interface, and the linguistics of Tibetan. Prior to Boston College, he completed a postdoc at Heinrich Heine University D眉sseldorf and taught at Carleton College. His research seeks to understand how speakers coordinate the movements of the lips, tongue, and larynx in time. To do this, he draws on diverse sources of data, including acoustic and articulatory experiments, computational simulations, and fieldwork. His dissertation,聽Temporal articulatory stability, phonological variation, and lexical contrast preservation in diaspora Tibetan,聽examines the variation in the relative timing of speech movements in Tibetan speakers living outside traditional Tibetan-speaking regions. In 2024, a聽corpus of his field recordings from Nepal was published by the Linguistic Data Consortium. As a teacher, he strives to empower students to see the world in new ways, including with quantitative tools, and to collaborate with students in research.听