Hi! My name is Jiayi Zhou (周佳旖). I’m from Shaoxing, China, a place famous for its wine, novelists, activists, rivers, and bridges. I grew up surrounded by stories, spoken aloud, written in books, or just soaked in wine. I’ve especially benefited from linguistic stories in Hangzhou (2017–2021), Osaka (2019), and Utrecht (2022–2024), and I’m eager to explore more in syntax and semantics. I’m also very curious about language evolution, multimodal linguistics, and anthropological linguistics. It’s often more about the specific topic and the people involved in the project, rather than the subfield itself.

I’m very excited to start new stories and learn more about linguistics as a PhD student at UConn, in Storrs. My ambition at this stage is to become a better thinker, though this often leaves me feeling anxious about finding my place in the “wild” life, outside academia. Is a better thinker always a better person? I’m aiming toward the way of becoming a better person though. It’s a great pleasure to have linguistics as my lens—whether a pair of glasses, a window, or a prism. Still, I sometimes struggle with having too much linguistics (or some scientific mindset) in my daily life. Anyway, thank you for reading these naive thoughts! I will probably change my metaphor and weave my stories as time goes on!

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