People

Program Director


Mark Sicoli 

Associate Professor, Anthropology (Ph.D. University of Michigan, 2007).
Multimodal interaction, prosody, gesture, community-engaged language documentation and revitalization, language in human evolution, computational phylogenetics, language contact, historical linguistics, Zapotec (Otomanguean), Nottoway (Iroquoian).


Faculty


Chris Chang-Bacon

Assistant Professor, Dept. of Curriculum, Instruction & Special Education, School of Education & Human Development (Ph.D. Boston College, 2019).
Equity in multilingual and multicultural contexts, educational policy, ESL, dual-language, bilingual education, critical literacy and anti-racist pedagogies in teacher education.


Janay Crabtree

Instructor, Center for American English Language & Culture (Ph.D. University of Georgia, 2010).
Second language acquisition, English as a second language, perception of non-native speakers and speech, adaptation to accented and non-native speech, interaction of native and non-native speakers, particularly in institutional venues.


Eve Danziger

Professor, Anthropology (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1991).
Verb argument structure, semantic typology, language and cognition, anthropological linguistics, child language and cultural socialization, ideologies of symbolic representation, Mayan linguistics, spontaneous sign languages. Website.


Lise Dobrin

Associate Professor, Anthropology (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1999).
Phonology, morphology, anthropological linguistics, ethnopoetics, language shift, language documentation and description, Arapesh language and culture (Papua New Guinea). Website.


Mark J. Elson

Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1973).
Linguistic theory, morphology, historical linguistics, Slavic and Balkan linguistics.


Coulter George

Professor, Classics (Ph.D. University of Cambridge, 2002).
Greek and Indo-European linguistics, diachronic syntax and pragmatics. Website.


Vikram Jaswal

Professor, Psychology (Ph.D. Stanford University, 2003).
Early word learning, pragmatics, cognitive development, communication and parent-child interactions in autism, cognitive development.


Christopher Krentz

Associate Professor of English and ASL (Ph.D University of Virginia 2002).
Deaf Studies; language acquisition; American Sign Language linguistics and storytelling.


Daniel Lefkowitz

Associate Professor, Anthropology and Middle East and South Asian Languages and Cultures (Ph.D. University of Texas, Austin, 1995).
Language and culture, language and identity, language and emotion, sociolinguistics, semiotics, Semitic languages, intonation, discourse analysis.


Filip Loncke

Professor, Curry School of Education and Psychology (Ph.D. University of Brussels, 1990).
Atypical communication, speech science, internal phonology, sentence processing, augmentative and alternative communication.


Armik Mirzayan

Visiting Assistant Professor, Linguistics (Ph.D. University of Colorado, Boulder, 2010).
Phonetics, phonology, typology, linguistic field methods, language documentation and language community building, Indigenous Languages of the Americas (Siouan and Caddoan Languages).


C. Daniel Meliza

Assistant Professor, Psychology (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 2005).
Development of auditory perception of vocalizations in animal models, neural plasticity, dynamical systems.


Rhonda Jennings-Arey

Assistant Professor, ASL (Ph.D in Adult Education, 2016).
Deaf Studies; American Sign Language; Deaf Education; ASL Literature; and ASL Linguistics.


Joel Rini

Professor, Spanish (Ph.D. University of Michigan, 1987).
Medieval Spanish language and diachronic linguistics, historical Spanish syntax, Ibero-Romance morphosyntax, morphophonology, phonology.


April Salerno

Assistant Professor, Curry School of Education Curriculum & Instruction (Ph.D. University of Virginia, 2014).
Classroom discourse, multilingual learners, language teacher education.


Gladys E. Saunders

Associate Professor, French (Ph.D. University of Michigan).
French phonetics and phonology, history of the French language, Romance dialectology, French applied linguistics, contact linguistics.


Emily Scida

Professor, Spanish (Ph.D. Cornell University, 1998).
Historical and comparative Romance linguistics, historical syntax, teacher education, instructional technology, e-portfolios, contemplative pedagogy.


Mark Sicoli (Program Director)

Associate Professor, Anthropology (Ph.D. University of Michigan, 2007).
Multimodal interaction, prosody, gesture, community-engaged language documentation and revitalization, language in human evolution, computational phylogenetics, language contact, historical linguistics, Zapotec (Otomanguean), Nottoway (Iroquoian).


Omar Velázquez-Mendoza

Associate Professor, Spanish (Ph.D. University of California, Davis, 2010).
Historical Spanish sociolinguistics, diachronic and synchronic Spanish morphosyntax, linguistic variation in Late Latin/Early Romance, development of advanced literacy in first and second languages, systemic functional linguistics.


Nathan A. Wendte

Visiting Assistant Professor, Linguistics (PhD, Tulane University, 2020).
Ethnolinguistic identity, language contact, language shift, language revitalization, French in the Americas, French-lexifier creoles, Indigenous languages of the Americas.


Postdoctoral Researchers


Samuel Beer

(Ph.D. University of Colorado, Boulder, 2017).
Language description, language death and complexity, language change, typology, morphosyntax, linguistic field methods, Nilo-Saharan and Kuliak languages.


Emeritus


Beverly Adams

Emeritus, Assistant Dean of the College and Associate Professor, Psychology (Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 1990).
Sentence processing, reading, language comprehension.


Peter S. Baker

Professor, English (Ph.D. Yale University, 1978).
Old English language and literature, Germanic linguistics, history of the English language.


John D. Bonvillian, In Memoriam

Emeritus, Psychology (Ph.D. Stanford University, 1974).
Child language acquisition, child development, sign languages, cognitive processes, psycholinguistics, deafness, child autism.


Ellen Contini-Morava

Emeritus, Anthropology (Ph.D. Columbia University, 1983).
Discourse, pragmatics, cognitive and functional linguistics, theories of grammar, tense-aspect-modality, noun categorization, Bantu languages, Swahili, noun classifiers and determiners in Mopan Maya.


Peter Hook

Emeritus, Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1973).
Typological and historical linguistics, Indo-Aryan languages, linguistics and literature.