Ryan Sandell

I am a UCLA-trained phonologist with a focus on historical linguistics and computational methods. 

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I am currently an Akademischer Oberrat (fixed-term Associate Professor) at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich) in the Institut für Vergleichende und Historische Sprachwissenschaft sowie Albanologie. I was first appointed as Akademischer Rat (fixed-term Assistant Professor) at the LMU in 2017, and prior to that, I was a Lecturer for the Department of Linguistics and Program in Indo-European Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where I also carried out my doctoral studies (in Indo-European Studies and Linguistics).

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My current principal area of research lies with the computational modeling of phonological phenomena and their implications for phonological theory, with particular attention to language change and learnability theory, employing corpus-linguistic and quantitative methods across the board. Data from some of the earliest-attested Indo-European languages (e.g., Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Gothic) form the empirical core of my work.

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My most recent book-length project was a study of prosodic change in stress and lexical accent systems. This project constituted my Habilitation thesis at the LMU Munich.