Rate My Professor Robert Henderson

Robert Henderson is Professor of Linguistics at The University of Arizona, with additional appointments in Cognitive Science, Second Language Acquisition and Teaching, Human Language Technology, Latin American Studies, and Philosophy. He serves as Director of Graduate Studies in Linguistics and has chaired multiple departmental committees on curriculum, equity, respect, inclusion, peer evaluation, and technology. Henderson earned a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2012, an M.A. in Linguistics from UC Santa Cruz in 2009, and a B.A. with highest honors in Linguistics and Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. His academic career prior to Arizona includes Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Wayne State University from 2013 to 2015 and Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University from 2012 to 2013. He joined The University of Arizona as Assistant Professor in 2015, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2019, and to Professor in 2024.

Henderson's research focuses on formal semantics and pragmatics, logic and language, prosody and prosodic morphology, and the documentation of Mesoamerican indigenous languages, particularly Mayan languages such as Kaqchikel and Uspanteko, informed by extensive fieldwork in Guatemala. Active projects include village sign languages in Mesoamerica as co-PI on a CNRS-UA grant, compositional morphosemantics of plurality in southwestern languages like Hiaki and Seri as PI on an NSF grant, and MesoUD syntactically annotated corpora for Mesoamerican languages as NSF co-PI. Key publications feature the book Signaling without Saying: The semantics and pragmatics of dogwhistles (with Elin McCready, Oxford University Press, 2024); "Vowel deletion as grammatically controlled gestural overlap in Uspanteko" (with Ryan Bennett and Meg Harvey, Language 99(3), 2023); "Donkeys under discussion" (with Lucas Champollion and Dylan Bumford, Semantics & Pragmatics 12, 2019); "The roots of measurement" (Glossa 4(1), 2019); "Expressive updates, much?" (with Daniel Gutzmann, Language 95(1), 2019); and "Prosodic smothering in Macedonian and Kaqchikel" (with Ryan Bennett and Boris Harizanov, Linguistic Inquiry 49(2), 2018). He has received major funding including NSF grants for $448,980 (2020), $166,923 (2016), and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2009-2012), and serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Semantics since 2017.