About Ross

I am a linguist, writer, and translator from New York City - Lenapehoking.

My book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York is out with Grove in the US and the UK in hardcover and audiobook, with paperback release in February 2025. It won the British Academy Book Prize and is longlisted for the Carnegie Medal.

As a linguist, I serve as co-director of the non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, where since 2013 I have overseen research projects focused on language documentation, mapping, policy, and public programming. Himalayan languages are a focus – for my PhD, I created a trilingual dictionary, a corpus of recordings, and a descriptive grammar of Trung, an endangered language of southwest China, based on several years of fieldwork. I also teach linguistics at Columbia. 

As a writer, I have written on language, labor, and China for The New York Times, The Guardian, and Harper's, among other places, and I published a book on unpaid work and youth economics (Intern Nation). I have given talks to students, scholars, employers, career counselors, union members, activists, and politicians at venues as different as the Googleplex, the UK Parliament, and the Economic Policy Institute, as well as universities and colleges across America. TV and radio appearances have been on MSNBC, CBS, Fox, BBC, and NPR, among others. 

As a translator, I work primarily from Chinese into English. I translated Liao Yiwu's Bullets and Opium (2019) and Chen Guangcheng's The Barefoot Lawyer (2015). I have recorded two Yiddish-language video series for The Forward and translated essays, stories, and poems as a National Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow.

I have a BA from Stanford, an M.Phil. from Cambridge, and an MA from the University of London (SOAS), the last two thanks to the British people as a Marshall Scholar. My PhD in Linguistics is from the University of Bern in Switzerland. I was a 2023 New Arizona Fellow at New America.