Lynne Murphy (University of Sussex, 1987 UMass BA in Linguistics & Philosophy) is a 2016 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. Her award was one of the first made under NEH’s Public Scholar grant program, “which was created in December 2014 as part of The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square, an agency-wide initiative that seeks to bring humanities into the public square and foster innovative ways to make scholarship relevant to contemporary life.” Lynne received a $50,400 grant to write How America Saved the English Language, a book that “explains why American and British national dialects differ and how they are changing with and despite each other’s influence.” Source: NEH website. Here is a link to Lynne’s blog: Separated by a Common Language.