Leadership

Our Dean

Jason Merchant joined Vanderbilt in July 2026 as the Searcy Family Dean of the College of Arts and Science and professor of philosophy.

Prior to Vanderbilt, Merchant spent more than two decades at the University of Chicago, serving in various leadership roles. Most recently he was vice provost for academic affairs and the Lorna Puttkammer Straus Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the College.

While at the University of Chicago, Jason oversaw all faculty and other academic appointments, promotions, recruitments, and retentions; oversaw policy for graduate degree programs and postdoctoral researchers; and led the resource center for support services, fellowships, internships, and career planning for graduate students and postdocs in academic and professional contexts. He also served as chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, interim chair of the Department of Linguistics, and deputy dean of the Humanities Division. He has been recognized with the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and with the Distinguished Graduate Student Alumni Award from the University of California Santa Cruz.

An accomplished scholar of linguistics, Merchant’s primary research is in formal syntax, having published and edited books and articles on grammatical theory, analysis of language structure in more than two dozen languages (with special emphasis on modern Greek), and formal semantics, morphology, and phonology. He has done fieldwork in the Balkans and has worked on historical semantics and legal interpretation and on bilingual children’s language competency. He has been associate editor for Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America, and for Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, and serves on the editorial boards of several journals and book series.

Merchant earned his B.A. in linguistics summa cum laude from Yale and his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has been a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Fellow at the University of Tübingen, a Fulbright Fellow at Utrecht University, and an Onassis Fellow at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He held postdoctoral fellowships at Northwestern University and the University of Groningen and has taught at the École Normale Supérieure, Leiden University, University College London, and Konkuk University, Seoul. He has studied 20 languages.