Our latest major project, MI Diaries, just received NSF funding! We're still recruiting research team members, community partners, and new diarists - click the logo below to visit the project website and find out more!
About Me
I'm an Assistant Professor of Sociolinguistics at Michigan State University. With Suzanne Wagner, I'm the co-director of the MSU Sociolinguistics Lab. I'm a quantitative sociophonologist -- what does that mean? First, it means I study phonology (sounds!) - with a particular focus on phonological variation and change. I look at the sociolinguistic aspects of sound variation: how it is affected by the macrosocial (like how an entire city is changing its pronunciation over time) as well as the microsocial (like how certain sounds index a speaker as sounding "tough"). And the quantitative part? I use quantitative methods to analyze sociophonological variation. Check out my research page to learn more!
I did a postdoctoral fellowship from 2018-2020 in the Learning and Development Lab at Georgetown University with Elissa Newport, where I used miniature artificial language experiments to investigate the way that children acquire sociolinguistic and phonological variation. I received my PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018, where my primary advisor was Bill Labov. My dissertation work focuses on the way that dramatic structural sound change (i.e., phonological change) is represented and produced by individual speakers during the change.
Updates
- In 2024 my NSF CAREER Grant was recommended for funding.
- In 2022 I was awarded an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant, to make our MI Diaries app infrastructure open source, so that anyone can adapt it to make their own remote recording app. Check out the app builder, and stay tuned for more info about building the accompanying server!
- In August 2021 I was awarded an NSF Linguistics Grant, with co-PI Suzanne Wagner, to fund our longitudinal project MI Diaries.
- In March 2020 I accepted a position as an Assistant Professor of Sociolinguistics at Michigan State University.
- In June 2018 I started a postdoc (PI: Elissa Newport). My work focuses on the way that children acquire phonological variation.
- In April 2018 I successfully defended my dissertation, ``Mechanisms of Phonological Change''. Read more about it here!
- I was awarded an LAGB Presenter Bursary (awarded to the top 6 student abstracts) for my presentation at LAGB 2017.
- In April 2016 I was awarded an NSF DDRI Grant to help fund my dissertation research.