Current DSNA Board Members and Editors

Steve Kleinedler (President) 

Steve Kleinedler is executive editor of the reference group at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, publishers of American Heritage Dictionary and Webster’s New World reference works. He joined the editorial staff of the American Heritage Dictionary in 1997 and worked as a freelance editor for several reference titles for National Textbook Company between 1989 and 1997. Steve earned a BA in linguistics from Northwestern University and attended graduate school at the University of Chicago for linguistics. He previously served on the DSNA executive board from 2005-2009.

Elizabeth Knowles (Vice-President)

Elizabeth Knowles began her career as a historical lexicographer at Oxford University Press in 1977, working as a library researcher for the second Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary. She was subsequently a senior editor for a major revision of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (4th edition, OUP 1993), when she was responsible for the dictionary’s historical research programme. She took over responsibility for Oxford’s quotations dictionaries in 1993, and has edited the last four editions of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (8th edition, 2014). Other editorial credits for OUP include What They Didn’t Say: A Book of Misquotations (2006) and How to Read a Word (2010). She has written and lectured on the history of dictionaries, and she served as editor of Dictionaries from 2010 to 2013. She is currently working on a study of quotations in the English language for Oxford University Press. She has been a Fellow of the Dictionary Society of North America since 2015.

Luanne von Schneidemesser (Past-President) 

Luanne von Schneidemesser is Senior Editor/Distinguished Scientist Emerita, Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) at UW-Madison. She holds a PhD in German linguistics. She carried out fieldwork for the Atlas der deutschen Umgangssprachen; has taught English and German; and has been invited to lecture in Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Finland, and Poland. Her publication topics include DARE, American regional English, settlement history, pop and soda, terms used in children’s games, Kansas vocabulary, German influences on American English, use of digital resources, and outreach. Most recently, she has presented frequently on Wisconsin Words. She has been president of the American Dialect Society; chair of the Executive Committee of the Conference of Administrative Officers of the American Council of Learned Societies and a member of the ACLS Board of Directors. She was Executive Secretary of DSNA1998-2007, is a fellow of the Society, and is currently President.

Kory Stamper (Executive Secretary)

Kory Stamper is an Associate Editor at Merriam-Webster. In her 19 years as a lexicographer, she's worked on dozens of titles, including Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, Merriam-Webster's Advanced Learner's English Dictionary, and the new Merriam-Webster Unabridged. In addition to defining, she writes for the Merriam-Webster website, appears in their popular "Ask the Editor" video series, and presents on language and lexicography at both national and international conferences. Kory received her bachelor's degree in Medieval Studies (with an early language/literature focus) from Smith College in 1996. Her first book, Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, was released by Pantheon in March 2017, and she is working on a second nonfiction book about defining for Pantheon.

Peter Gilliver (Board Member)

Peter Gilliver is an Associate Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary; he has been a member of the OED’s editorial staff since 1987. For much of that time he has also been researching and writing about the history of the project; his book The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary was published by OUP in 2016. He is also the co-author (with fellow lexicographers Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Weiner) of The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (2006). He has been presenting papers on the history of the OED at the DSNA’s meetings since 2003, and has had several of these papers published in Dictionaries; he has also spoken and written widely elsewhere both on the history of the Dictionary and on Tolkien. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the LEME (Lexicons of Early Modern English) project.

Sarah Ogilvie (Board Member)

Sarah Ogilvie is a linguist and lexicographer at Stanford University. She previously taught linguistics at Cambridge University (Alice Tong Tze Research Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College) and at the Australian National University (Director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre and Chief Editor of Oxford Dictionaries, Australia). As a practical lexicographer she has written both diachronic dictionaries (Editor at the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) responsible for World Englishes and words of non-European provenance) and synchronic dictionaries (she was Etymologist of the current Shorter Oxford Dictionary and has written several general desktop dictionaries in Britain and Australia, including thesauruses and children’s dictionaries). In addition, she works on endangered languages and wrote a bilingual dictionary and grammar of Morrobalama, an Aboriginal language of Australia. Technology is a large focus of her work and research and in 2012-2014, she worked on digital dictionaries and software for Amazon Kindle at Lab126, Amazon’s innovation lab in Silicon Valley. Sarah is originally from Australia where she studied for a BSc in Computer Science and Pure Mathematics at the University of Queensland and a MA in Linguistics at the Australian National University, before completing a doctorate in Linguistics at Oxford University. She is author of Words of the World: a global history of the Oxford English Dictionary (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and co-editor of The Concise Encyclopedia of the Language of the World (Elsevier, 2008) and Keeping Languages Alive: documentation, pedagogy, and revitalization (Cambridge University Press, 2014). 

Lise Winer (Board Member) 

Lise Winer is professor emerita in the Faculty of Education, McGill University, Montreal, specializing in second language education, sociolinguistics, and creole studies.  She is the editor of The Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad & Tobago (2009), and the author of lexicography publications on ethnic and domain-specific lexicon, historical flora and fauna lexicon, etymology, and orthography.  She has given four presentations at DSNA conferences and has two publications in Dictionaries.  She serves on the Publications and Executive Committees, and  was the local conference chair for DSNA 2011 in Montreal.

Stefan Dollinger (Board Member)

Stefan Dollinger is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Gothenburg and Associate Professor of English at UBC Vancouver (PhD in English Linguistics, Vienna University, 2006). He specializes in historical linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics and the lexicography and lexicology of varieties of English. Author of some 40+ papers, his books include New-Dialect Formation in Canada (2008, John Benjamins) and The Written Questionnaire in Social Dialectology (2015, John Benjamins) and, as editor-in-chief, the new edition of A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP-2, expected for 2016) and the digitized first edition DCHP-1 (Avis et al. 1967), which is now available in open access: www.dchp.ca/DCHP-1.

Ed Finegan (Editor of Dictionaries) 

Ed Finegan is professor emeritus of linguistics and law at the University of Southern California, where he continues to lecture in the law school and serve as director of the university’s Center for Excellence in Teaching. He has co-edited Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register (OUP) and Language in the USA (CUP); his textbook Language: Its Structure and Use (Cengage) is now in its seventh edition and on its last legs. In Attitudes toward English Usage: A History of a War of Words (Teachers College Press) and in chapters in two volumes of the Cambridge History of the English Language, he wrote about the treatment of usage and grammar in dictionaries and elsewhere. He has also written about North American English in CUP’s A History of the English Language and is preparing an article on the history of English in North America for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. In an earlier life as a corpus linguist, he was a co-creator of ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers). Now, in work in forensic linguistics, he relies heavily on corpora and dictionaries alike. He has also written about legal (and illegal) English and, from 2012 to 2015, served as president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists. He was the founding general editor of Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics and at present is DSNA’s delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies and, since 2015, editor of DSNA’s journal, Dictionaries. During much of 2015 and early 2016 he served as a consultant to “Hollywood Is a Verb: Los Angeles Tackles the Oxford English Dictionary,” and his essay on the OED appears at the project’s website: LFLA.org/OED.

Traci Nagle (Review Editor for Dictionaries)

Traci Nagle holds master’s degrees in English and Linguistics and is near completion of a doctorate in Linguistics, all at Indiana University, Bloomington. When not studying the interfaces between phonetics, phonology or morphology, or the lexicography and use of English in South Asia, she teaches writing, plays competitive recreational tennis, and volunteers in her community.

David Jost (Editor of DSNA Newsletter) 

David Jost was, until the end of 2012, a vice president at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co. where he was in charge of digital content development. Having served as assistant and associate editor for nine years (1975-1984) at the Middle English Dictionary, he became Senior Lexicographer for the third edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, published in 1992. From 2003 to 2005 he was president of the DSNA and was elected a Fellow in 2015.