Jason Merchant is the Lorna Puttkammer Straus Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and Vice Provost for Academic Appointments and Graduate Education at the University of Chicago, as well as Faculty Director of UChicagoGRAD.
[1][2] Merchant earned his PhD in linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1999, and his BA summa cum laude in linguistics at Yale University in 1991.
Merchant became Vice Provost in 2018, having previously served as chair of the linguistics department, chair of the department of Slavic languages and literatures, and as deputy dean of the humanities.
His work has included adjudicating claims of academic misconduct and fraud; he was instrumental in granting a PhD to a chemistry student 48 years after her department failed to support her when her advisor died.
[8] Merchant is a linguist who has worked on the syntax and semantics of ellipsis, grammatical systems of case and agreement in a variety of languages, and on historical semantics and legal interpretation.