Nicholas Henriksen

Nicholas (Nick) Henriksen is Chair of the Department of History of Art (2026–2029) and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Spanish Linguistics in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures (RLL), with an appointment in the Department of Linguistics. He was named a Thurnau Professor in 2024. 

Henriksen has held several leadership roles across the university. In RLL, he served as Associate Chair from 2019 to 2023 and as Interim Assistant Chair from 2023 to 2024. He was also the founding chair of the department’s Gender Diversity Committee and currenlty co-directs the Speech Production Lab. At the university level, he served on the U-M bargaining team for the 2021 LEO contract and chaired a University Grievance Hearing Board. He currently serves on the Provost’s STRIDE Committee and the Thurnau Advisory Council. Beyond Michigan, Henriksen is Associate Executive Director of the journal Language Learning.

Henriksen's research focuses on the sound systems of language. He is especially interested in how the fine phonetic detail of speech relates to the knowledge speakers hold about the sounds of their language. He has published on Spanish intonation and on sound change in Andalusian Spanish, and in 2021 he received the Linguistic Society of America’s Early Career Award. At Michigan, he helps lead “From Africa to Patagonia: Voices of Displacement,” a collaborative project with nearly 50 team members that studies the language of Afrikaans-Spanish bilinguals in Patagonia, Argentina. Through it, he has come to value the questions of migration, memory, and cultural heritage that also animate much of the work in History of Art. He is also committed to undergraduate research mentoring and received the 2025 Outstanding Research Mentor Award from the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program.