20th Annual Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (CULC20)
April 25-26, 2026
Cornell University's undergraduate linguistics association, The UnderLings, presents its 20th annual undergraduate research conference. By facilitating communication and discussion between researchers, the conference aims to promote undergraduate research at all levels throughout the linguistics community.
Internal Keynote Speaker: Sarah Murray, Cornell University
Sarah's primary research is in the semantics and pragmatics of natural language, specifically what sorts of formal representations are needed to analyze a variety of linguistic structures across grammatically diverse languages. Topics she has worked on include evidentiality, modality, plurality, connectives, sentential mood, and speech acts.
Sarah's research combines formal theories of meaning and discourse with documentation and analysis of understudied languages. She is interested in language documentation, methodology for elicitation, community-based language work, and collaboration for language revitalization and reclamation. She has worked with the Cheyenne community in Southeastern Montana since 2006 on a variety of language projects. She is also the director of the Cornell Language Documentation Lab.
External Keynote Speaker: Jesse Lundquist, Princeton University
Trained as a historical linguist, by nature a lover of literature, Professor Lundquist specialize in Indo-European languages and cultures, especially the earliest poetic traditions in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and the Anatolian branch. Professor Lundquist has earned degrees in Latin & Linguistics (Manchester) and Indo-European Studies (UCLA, 2017), have been a Fellow in Classics (Harvard) and a Junior Research Fellow in Comparative Philology (Wolfson College, Oxford), and plans to keep pursuing these paths, linguistics and literature, at Princeton.
Call for Abstracts
CULC is a conference run by undergraduate students highlighting undergraduate research. Undergraduates in Linguistics (Underlings) at Cornell University is now accepting abstracts for the 20th Annual Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium. We are looking for undergraduate presenters from any university to submit their abstracts for a 20 minute oral presentation or poster presentation.
Abstract submission guidelines:
Deadline: February 21, 2026 11:59PM EST The abstract should be no more than 500 words (excluding citations) in PDF format and completely anonymous (do not include your name or affiliation in the file name and file name). Please submit the PDF to culc@cornell.edu. f you have any questions, please email culc@cornell.edu.
Important Dates
Abstract Submission deadline: Feb 21, 2026 (11:59pm EST)
Notification of decisions: mid-March, 2026 (or sooner)
Conference date: April 25-26, 2026