I am currently in my second year of the PhD program in Linguistics at Stanford University. I am a sociolinguist primarily, with a strong interest in ethnic and world varieties of English. At Stanford, my current faculty research directors are Penny Eckert, John Rickford, and Rob Podesva, although I've benefitted from working with several other faculty and student colleagues in the department as well, including Tom Wasow, Vera Gribanova, and Meghan Sumner.
Before coming to Stanford, I received my MA in English Linguistics at North Carolina State University under the primary supervision of Walt Wolfram, as well as Erik Thomas and Robin Dodsworth.
Thus far, my work has focused on ethnic and regional varieties of English in the United States, including African American English, Chicano English, Japanese American English, and regional California and North Carolina varieties. At Stanford, I'm happy to be a contributing field worker and researcher in the Voices of California project, concentrating mainly on sociophonetic variation of several regional California dialects. My contribution to this work has been analyses of the status of the California vowel shift and change in the production of sibilants in Redding, California (with special focus on speakers from Redding's LGBT community). Currently, I'm working on my second qualifying paper, in which I seek to document a unique variety of ethnic American English among Japanese Americans from the Merced, California, area who were interned in concentration camps on US soil during World War II.
I also continue to be a contributing researcher for the North Carolina Language and Life Project, where my work includes analysis of morphosyntactic features of African American English from a longitudinal corpuse of child language housed at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute as well as sociophonetic analyses of vowels and consonants in African American and Chicano Englishes.
Outside of English, I enjoy investigating the Lithuanian, Russian, and most recently, Kazakh languages. I have just finished up a syntactic analysis of movement/splitting phenomena in the Lithuanian noun phrase, and have recently completed extensive field work with a Kazakh speaker in which I investigated parallels between noun phrase structure and nominalized embedded clauses in Kazakh.
When I'm not working on linguistic matters, I'm most likely to be found spending time with my family. I have a husband and two amazing boys (aged 6 and 4), who are featured in the various photographs on my website. We love activity, which means bike riding, swimming, ice skating, exploring, and traveling whenever we have the chance.
Thanks a lot for visiting my site, and please don't hesitate to send me an email to discuss my research or linguistics in general.
