Hi, I’m Rosetta and I am thrilled to be joining the Sundress team as an intern! I have been fascinated by language since a young age, and I began teaching myself languages other than English at age 11 when my family traveled to Malawi and I learned some basic phrases in Chichewa, and so far my pursuit of formal language education has enabled me to become conversationally fluent in French and Russian. I have studied linguistic theory and published a scholarly article on language contact between Proto-Russian and Scandinavian languages, which received the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Memorial Prize for Outstanding Undergraduate Research at Harvard University. I also had the privilege of working in the Pama-Nyungan Lab at Yale University, which focuses on the historical linguistics, prehistory, and documentation of Australian Aboriginal languages.
Of course, I have also loved reading from a very young age, and I find joy in applying linguistic theory to literary analysis. While pursuing my bachelor’s degree at Wheaton College, I worked in a lab that uses text mining software and word frequency and distribution algorithms to analyze authorship of and relationships between literary works, a discipline called lexomics. My work in the lexomics lab led to the publication of a paper that I co-authored on the literary relationship between two Icelandic sagas. I produced an annotated translation of the Old English poem Juliana for my senior honors thesis, in which my annotations focused on explaining important linguistic and artistic choices I made in my Modern English translation. While I have found a love in studying the role that language plays in literature, my first love was and always will be sitting down with a good book and just getting lost in it.
In addition to reading, writing, and learning languages, I enjoy listening to podcasts and music (especially symphonic metal), playing video games, and being used as a pillow (or bed) by my tuxedo cat Chiyo. I am so excited to join the Sundress community and look forward to being a contributing member of the team!
Rosetta Berger is a recent graduate of Wheaton College (Massachusetts), where she double majored in English and Russian Studies and studied literary and linguistic analysis. She has also studied at the University of Edinburgh and worked as a research assistant in a linguistics lab at Yale University. Rosetta has published scholarly articles on the literary relationship between Icelandic sagas and on the historical development of the Russian language, a paper which was recognized with the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Memorial Prize for Outstanding Undergraduate Research at Harvard University.
