Bio

Alexander "Lex" Meisel is a Fulbright predoctoral researcher at the University of Barcelona, where he works on the Scripta project and the VarSinRom research project to investigate Algherese, the endangered Catalan dialect spoken in the Sardinian city of Alghero. He has been appointed Scholar-in-Residence at the Ateneu Alguerès, where he has carried out archival and fieldwork in northern Sardinia, and is a collaborating corpus linguist at the Institute for Catalan Studies.

Lex graduated summa cum laude from Columbia College, Columbia University, in 2025, with a double major in Linguistics and Comparative Literature and Society. His final degree project, "At the Limits of Catalan: Algherese as a Contact Language" received Honours in Linguistics and was selected for Columbia's Senior Thesis Symposium from among the five humanities and social science theses chosen from across the university. He was admitted to the junior chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, ranking in the top 2% of his class.

Project

The project Alexander Finn Meisel will work on at Faberllull consists of tracing the morphosyntactic change brought about by contact in Algherese Catalan through the archive. Based on the diachronic corpus Scripta Algueresa, it studies four diagnostic features — the periphrastic perfect, the order of possessives, the imperfect subjunctive and differential object marking — each divergent from general Catalan but convergent with Logudorese Sardinian or Sassarese, and anchors them chronologically to the plagues of 1582 and 1652. During the residency, he will present these results and discuss them with Catalan specialists to refine their interpretation and methodological implications.