ABOUT ME
Originally from a small town in the middle of Nebraska (yay cornfields?), I moved to Edinburgh, Scotland in 2011 and from there moved to Copenhagen, Denmark in 2019. In 2021 I moved to Aarhus, Denmark for my position as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Sociophonetics. Before my international transfer I'd studied at a small liberal arts school located in my home town, Hastings College. Deciding I wanted to be highly employable (ha!) I obtained a BA in both Theatre Arts and English Linguistics in 2009. Following a pseudo nomadic period of my life, I then went to Edinburgh for my masters degree.
My MSc. was in the Evolution of Language and Cognition (now the Language Evolution and Computation program) at the University of Edinburgh. I'd realised that my research interests did not fully align with the admittedly very interesting work they are doing there, and shifted the focus of my dissertation to sociophonetics (which I was, and still am very keen on), examining political party affiliation and phonetic variation of Scottish politicians in the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood.
After a year long hiatus, I realised I wasn't done with the beautiful city of Edinburgh or sociolinguistics, and I returned to the University of Edinburgh for my PhD. My research there was concerned with linguistic variation and change. Specifically, I'm interested in how individuals employ linguistic variants, often in conjunction with other aspects of their material style, to construct their identity. Furthermore, my research examines how bilingual speakers enact these forms of identity construction in both native language and second language speech. I successfully passed my viva in May 2018 and I submitted my final copy in August 2018. You can read all about my thesis here. Outwith the PhD I also worked with Lauren Hall-Lew on sociolinguistic methodological practices. You can read more about that here, or here.
I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Aarhus working on 'the Human Voice' Project. If you're interested in finding out a bit more about me, feel free to contact me, or follow any of the links at the top of the page. I look forward to hearing from you!