James P. Blevins received his Ph.D in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1990 and has taught in Cambridge since 1997, where he is currently Reader in Morphology and Syntax. He is a general linguist with a primary focus on the structure and complexity of inflectional and grammatical systems. His research approaches these issues from the standpoint of contemporary word and paradigm models, using analytic tools and insights drawn from information-theoretic and discriminative learning perspectives. He has secondary interests in quantitative and computational models of grammatical systems, as well as in aspects of sound and meaning that interact closely with grammar. His main areal interests fall within Germanic, Finnic, Slavic, and Kartvelian.