Elisabeth O. Selkirk is a theoretical linguist specializing in phonological theory and the syntax-phonology interface. She is currently a professor emerita in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2012.
Selkirk received her PhD in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972, under the supervision of Morris Halle. She served as Head of the Linguistics Department at UMass beginning in 1998.
Selkirk's work has focused on organizing phonological units into prosodic structure, as well as how phonology interacts with other parts of the grammar, including morphology and syntax. A volume of essays examining the phonology of many languages was published in her honor in 2011.