Joseph Elias Aoun

Joseph Aoun (born March 26, 1953) is a Lebanese-born American linguist and academic administrator, currently serving as the 7th president of Northeastern University in Boston since August 2006. Previously, Aoun was dean of the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California. He joined USC in 1982 in the Department of Linguistics, and during his time at USC served as head of the academic Senate. As a theoretical syntactician, he is known for his work on logical form and wh-movement. Biography Joseph E. Aoun was born in the Lebanese capital of Beirut. He earned a Masters in Oriental Languages and Literature at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut in 1975, a Diploma of Advanced Studies in General and Theoretical Linguistics at the University of Paris VIII in 1977, and a PhD in Linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981. He joined the University of Southern California (USC) in 1982 as a Linguistics Professor. During his time at USC, he served as president of head and eventually became a Dean. His success in fund-raising allowed for the hiring of multiple professors, the creation of named chairs backed by endowments, and the creation of two new sub-departments for the study of Armenian and Korean. He is married to his wife Zeina; the couple has two sons, Adrian and Joseph Karim.