Fidler is a native of Japan. After her undergraduate studies (Russian literature) at Waseda University in Tokyo, Fidler completed her PhD in Slavic Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her primary focus is on teaching and research on Czech language, culture, and linguistics. Fidler has an on-going scholarly project with the Czech National Corpus at Charles University. She also serves as a faculty liaison for the Memorandum of Understanding between Brown and Charles University.
Fidler attributes her career path to her family history. Her parents became academics despite social and political hardships and gender bias during and after WWII. Her grandfather became a prominent professional classical musician against a number of obstacles. As an orchestral conductor who introduced Russian music to Japan, he is the person who first sparked Fidler’s interest in Slavic cultures.
| Masako Fidler and Václav Cvrček. "Anti-system web portals and their network of meaning: a corpus-based approach in Czech." AATSEEL abtracts 2020, 2020. |
| Masako Fidler and Václav Cvrček. "In the name of scientific precision: Václav Havel’s Ptydepe." Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 64, no. 2, 2020, pp. 260-283. |
| Masako Fidler. "Metaphor comprehension of visual image via linguistic forms: A pilot analysis of A Quiet Week in a House by Jan Švankmajer." Book of Abtracts SCLA, 2019. |
| Václav Cvrček and Masako Fidler. "More than keywords: Discourse prominence analysis of Russian Web Portal Sputnik Czech Republic." Political Discourse in Central, Eastern and Balkan Europe, edited by Martina Berrocal and Aleksandra Salamurović, John Benjamins, 2019, pp. 93-117. |
| Masako Fidler. "The power of “not saying who” in Czech onomaopoeia." Ideophones, Mimetics and Expressives, edited by K. Akita and P. Prashant, John Benjamins, 2019, pp. 200-227. |
| Václav Cvrček an Masako Fidler. "Up close and personal vs. birds-eye view” of discourse: a corpus study of perspective." International Cognitive Linguistics Conference 15 Book of Abstracts, 2019. |
| Masako Fidler. "Czech onomatopoeia in non-artistic genres: A tricky ambiguity." Zeleni drželi zeleni breb: Studies in honor of Marc Greenberg, edited by S. M. Dickey and M. Lauersdorf, Bloomington, Slavica, 2018, pp. 58-78. |
| Masako Fidler and Václav Cvrček. "Going beyond “aboutness”: A quantitative analysis of Sputnik Czech Republic." Taming the corpus: From inflection and lexis to interpretation (QuantitativeMethods in the Humanities and Social Sciences series, edited by Masako Fidler and Václav Cvrček, springer cham, 2018, pp. 195-225. |
| Václav Cvrček and Masako Fidler. "Introduction." Taming the corpus: From inflection and lexis to interpretation (QuantitativeMethods in the Humanities and Social Sciences series, edited by Masako Fidler and Václav Cvrček, springer cham, 2018, pp. 1-8. |
| "Ptydepe and Chorukor: Artificial languages and socialist discourse." AATSEEL abstracts 2018, 2018. |
| Taming the corpus: From inflection and lexis to interpretation (QuantitativeMethods in the Humanities and Social Sciences series). edited by Masako Fidler and Václav Cvrček, springer cham, 2018. |
| Václav Cvrček and Masako Fidler. "Corpus-assisted discourse analysis of pro-Kremlin propaganda with inflectional morphemes." International Cognitive Linguistics Conference abstracts, 2017. |
| Fidler, Masako and Václav Cvrček. "Keymorph analysis, or how morphosyntax informs discourse." Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 2017. |
| Václav Cvrček and Masako Fidler. "Probing Aspectual Context with Keyword Analysis." Each Venture a New Beginning: Studies in Honor of Laura A. Janda, edited by A. Makarova, S. M. Dickey, and D. Divijak, Bloomington, Slavica, 2017, pp. 279-298. |
| Masako Fidler and Václav Cvrček. "An alternative viewpoint or agitprop? A corpus-based analysis of the news-opinion portal Sputnik." AATSEEL abstracts 2016, 2016. |
| "Entrenchment." Nový Encyklopedický slovník češtiny [New Encyclopedic Dictionary of Czech], edited by Karlík, P., M. Nekula, and J. Pleskalová, Lidové noviny, 2016, pp. 426. |
| "Ikonicita [Iconicity]." Nový Encyklopedický slovník češtiny [New Encyclopedic Dictionary of Czech], edited by Karlík, P., M. Nekula, and J. Pleskalová, Prague, Lidové noviny, 2016, pp. 672–673. |
| "Prostorová sémantika [spatial semantics].", edited by Karlík, P., M. Nekula, and J. Pleskalová, Prague, Lidové noviny, 2016, pp. 1438–1439. |
| "Schéma [Schema].", edited by Karlík, P., M. Nekula, and J. Pleskalová, Prague, Lidové noviny, 2016, pp. 1616–1618. |
| "Silová dynamika [Force Dynamics].", edited by Karlík, P., M. Nekula, and J. Pleskalová, Prague, Lidové noviny, 2016, pp. 1622–1623. |
| "The other in the Czech Republic: Their image and their languages." International Journal of the Sociology of Language, vol. 238, 2016, pp. 37-58. |
| Fidler, Masako and Cvrček, V. "A data-driven analysis of reader viewpoint: Reconstructing the historical reader using keyword analysis." Journal of Slavic Linguistics, vol. 23, no. 2, 2015, pp. 197–239. |
| Fidler, Masako. "Conceptualization of Onomatopoeia: Observations from Czech Data." Zeitschrift für Slawistik, vol. 51, no. 4, 2006. |
| Fidler, Masako U., Grant, Anthony P., Grant, Anthony P., Grohmann, Kleanthes K., Kaye, Alan S., Kaye, Alan S., Kaye, Alan S., Matschi, Marion, Peng, Virginia, Rajagopalan, Kanavillil, Rajagopalan, Kanavillil, Rajagopalan, Kanavillil, Rajagopalan, Kanavillil, Vajda, Edward J., Vajda, Edward J., Vajda, Edward J., Vajda, Edward J., Walker, Douglas C., Wichmann, Søren, Yang, Xinzhang. "Reviews." WORD, vol. 57, no. 1, 2006, pp. 103-178. |
| Fidler, Masako. "Reading and Studying Culture with Electronic Materials." Canadian Slavonic Papers, vol. 46, no. 1-2, 2004, pp. 83-100. |
Professor Fidler's areas of expertise include comparative linguistics (especially dealing with Czech, Russian and Japanese), discourse analysis, corpus-assisted discouse analysis and sociolinguistics and cognitive linguistics.
Masako Fidler currently works in two projects in linguistics. One of them concerns sound symbolism in Czech and its relevance to grammar and discourse. Her monograph Onomatopoeia in Czech (2014) was awarded the Best Book in Slavic Linguistics in 2015 by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. The other project is entitled the Needle-in-a-Haystack Method (NHM), in collaboration with the Institute of the Czech National Corpus at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. It is a quantitative text analysis project. Fidler recently published a co-edited book (with Václav Cvrček, Charles University) Taming of the Corpus: From Inflection and Lexis to Interpretation (2018). The book showcases various ways in which a highly inflectional language such as Czech can help unpack a wide array of resesarch questions in phonology, grammar, translation, poetry, authorship of literary texts, and representation of gender and politics.
Current grants
Brown Humanities Research Fund (Dec 2020-2022)
Participant of interdisciplinary project Threat-Defuser: Hybrid warfare and a plan to safeguard societies, sponsored by the Norweigian Research Council. (Sept 2020 - August 2026)
Completed grants
Grant from the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs to fund the lecture panel "Identity Threat and Cyber Security: Czech Language and Identity in the Globalizing World, held at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, October 27, 2021.
Charles K. Colver Lectureship and the C. V. Starr Foundation Lectureship Funds (for organizing the Workshop on Quantitative Text Analysis for the Humanities and Social Sciences) through the Office of the Dean of the Faculty (2015-16) $1,800.
Selected publications
Cvrček, V. and M. Fidler. 2022. To appear. No keyword is an island: In search of covert associations. Corpora. 17(2).
Fidler, M. and V. Cvrček. 2020. In the name of scientific precision: Václav Havel’s Ptydepe. Artificial Languages in Czech Literature, a special issue of Slavic and East European Journal. Laura A. Janda, ed. 64(2). Summer, 260-283.
Fidler, M. and V. Cvrček. 2019. Keymorph analysis, or how morphosyntax informs discourse. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. 15(1): 39-70. DOI 10.1515/cllt-2016-0073
Cvrček, V. and M. Fidler. 2019. More than keywords: Discourse prominence analysis of Russian Web Portal Sputnik Czech Republic. Political Discourse in Central, Eastern and Balkan Europe, edited by Martina Berrocal and Aleksandra Salamurović. Benjamins. 93-117. https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.84.05cvr
Cvrček, V. and M. Fidler. 2019. More than keywords: Discourse prominence analysis of Russian Web Portal Sputnik Czech Republic. Political Discourse in Central, Eastern and Balkan Europe, edited by Martina Berrocal and Aleksandra Salamurović. Benjamins. 93-117. https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.84.05cvrFidler, M. 2019. The power of “not saying who” in Czech onomaopoeia. Ideophones, Mimetics and Expressives (https://benjamins.com/catalog/ill.16), ed. by K. Akita and P. Prashant. Benjamins. 200-227.
Fidler, M. and V. Cvrček. eds. 2018.Taming the corpus: From inflection and lexis to interpretation (QuantitativeMethods in the Humanities and Social Sciences series). Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature Switzerland
Fidler, M. and V. Cvrček. 2018. Going beyond “aboutness”:A quantitative analysis of Sputnik Czech Republic. Taming the corpus: From inflection and lexis to interpretation (QuantitativeMethods in the Humanities and Social Sciences series), ed. byM. Fidler and V. Cvrček. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature Switzerland. 195-225.
Fidler, M. The others in the Czech Republic: Their image and their languages. 2016. To appear in the special volume (238, 2016) of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language: Multilingualism and minorities in the Czech sociolinguistic space, ed. Lida Cope and Eva Eckert.
M. Fidler and V. Cvrček. 2015. Corpus-assisted analysis of reader viewpoints: Reconstructing the historical reader using keyword analysis. To appear in Journal of Slavic Linguistics 23 (2).
Onomatopoeia in Czech: A Conceptualization of Sound and Its Connections to Grammar and Discourse. Slavica: IN. 2014.
| Year | Degree | Institution |
|---|---|---|
| 1991 | PhD | University of California, Los Angeles |
| 1985 | MA | University of California, Los Angeles |
| 1983 | BA | Waseda University |
1984-86: Sokol Fellowship in Slavic Languages and Literatures,
1987-88: Phi Beta Kappa Alumni Award, University of California at Los Angeles
1996-98: Elected President of the North American Association of Teachers of Czech
2004: National Award for Best Teaching on the Post-Secondary
Level, National Award from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic & East European Languages
2015: Best book in Slavic linguistics, National Award from the Amerian Association of Teachers of Slavic & East European Languages (Onomatopoeia in Czech. Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica Publishers, 2014).
American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages
American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies
International Association of Teachers of Czech
International Cognitive Linguistics Association
Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Association
Czech language and culture, Czech animation, Slavic linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Comparative Analysis of Czech and Russian, Old Church Slavonic
| CZCH 0100 - Introductory Czech |
| CZCH 0200 - Introductory Czech |
| CZCH 0320A - Czech Animation: Cross-cultural Dialogs |
| CZCH 0410B - Coming of Age in Postwar Czechoslovakia |
| CZCH 0410D - Czechs and the Big Brother: Czech Lands in the 1980s |
| CZCH 0610B - Psychosis of Occupation in the Czech Lands |
| CZCH 0610C - Czech Cultural Icons, Emblems, and National Identity |
| CZCH 1000 - Dimensions of Czech Animation: Contexts, Interpretations, and Dialogs with the East |
| SLAV 1300 - Sociolinguistics (with Case Studies on the Former USSR and Eastern Europe) |
| SLAV 2210 - Old Church Slavonic |
