Sami Jiries is a PhD student in Comparative Semitics, focusing mainly on Arabic and Aramaic. His research interests include the sociolinguistics and the historical development of Levantine Arabic dialects and language contact between Arabic and Aramaic. He is currently researching whether clitic doubling in Levantine Arabic can be traced back to a similar syntactic construction found in many Aramaic varieties within a framework of historical and contact linguistics. Sami holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a master’s degree in Linguistics from Northeastern Illinois University. His master’s thesis, titled “Gender and National Identity In Jordanian Arabic,” investigates how speakers of Jordanian Arabic express their identity through sociophonetic strategies.