Education
Ph.D. (2014) Linguistics, Cornell University
M.A. (2005) Linguistics, University of North Carolina
B.A. (2003) Spanish and Linguistics, University of Virginia
Employment
Southeast Asia Administrator, Carolina Asia Center, UNC–Chapel Hill, since 2018
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Linguistics, UNC–Chapel Hill, since 2016
English Language Specialist, Writing Center, UNC–Chapel Hill, 2014 – 2019
Teaching
Credit-bearing courses
Languages of Southeast Asia
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Navigating the Research University
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
First-year Writing Seminar: The Death of Language
Cornell University, Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines
Introduction to Linguistics
Cornell University
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Introduction to Spanish
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Intermediate ESL, Writing and Grammar
Richland Community College, Dallas, TX
Non-credit-bearing courses
US English Pronunciation
Research Presentation Skills
Academic Writing for Graduate Students
Recent Funding
2022 – 2023. Southeast Asian North Carolina. Association of Asian Studies Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Higher Education Curriculum Development Grant.
2017 – 2022. Southeast Asian Approaches, with Krupal Amin, Lorraine Aragon, Kevin Fogg, Angel Hsu, Noah Kittner, Holning Lau, Christian Lentz. Carolina Seminars.
2018 – 2021. Migration Stories: Linguistics and Belonging among Refugees from Burma, with Jennifer Boehm, Morgan Pitelka, Amy Reynolds. Humanities for the Public Good Critical Issues Project Fund.
2016. Linguistic Diversity, with Katya Pertsova. Thrive@Carolina Innovation and Collaboration Grant.
Publications
2018. [With Wolf, S. & Pertsova, K.] Dialect diversity at the university: A report
on the effectiveness of an educational initiative. Proceedings of SALSA XXVI.
2015. Approaching a phonological understanding of the sesquisyllable with phonetic evidence from Khmer and Bunong. In N.J. Enfield & B. Comrie (Eds.), Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia: The State of the Art. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
2014. Bunong. In M. Jenny & P. Sidwell (Eds.), The Handbook of Austroasiatic Languages. Leiden: Brill.
2014. Deconstructing the Southeast Asian Sesquisyllable: A Gestural Account. Ph.D. dissertation. Cornell University.
2014. A Gestural Account of Minor Syllables: Evidence from Khmer. Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (2012).
2012. [With Tilsen, S. et al.] A Cross-linguistic Investigation of Articulatory Coordination in Word-initial Consonant Clusters. Cornell Working Papers in Phonetics and Phonology.
2006. The Pharyngeal Hierarchy. SKY Journal of Linguistics 19:229-237.
Film and Audio
2021 (forthcoming). Migration Stories. Oral history interviews of Carrboro/Chapel Hill’s Burmese and Karen communities, with Jennifer Boehm, Talar Hso, Hikhrihay Htee, Amy Reynolds, Sofia Thein. Southern Mix Collection, Southern Oral History Program, UNC.
2021 (forthcoming). LING 260/ASIA 260. Oral history interviews by students on language use among Southeast Asian Americans in the US South. Southern Mix Collection, Southern Oral History Program, UNC.
2017. Hark the Sound. Short film on dialect diversity at UNC, with Katya Pertsova.
Presentations and Posters
2022. [With Yamate, S.] The Way You Say It Matters. National Association of Women Lawyers Mid-Year Meeting.
2019. [With Boehm, J. & Reynolds, A.] Narratives of Linguistics and Belonging among Refugees from Burma. Asia Scholars Network Conference. UNC – Chapel Hill.
2019. [With Mora-Marin, D.] Linguistic Diversity and Linguistic Justice in the Contemporary World. Flyleaf Books Humanities in Action Series.
2018. [With Christian, W.] Introducing International Students to Writing about Race and Ethnicity. International Writing Centers’ Association, Atlanta, GA.
2018. Dialect Diversity at the University: A Report on the Effectiveness of an Educational Initiative. SALSA XXVI, University of Texas at Austin.
2018. Languages from the Highlands: An Overview of Linguistic Viability. Cambodian Highlanders Conference, UNC – Wilmington.
2016. [With Smith, R. & Oh, S.] Bringing Consensus to Writing Centers: A Radical New Frontier. International Writing Centers’ Association, Denver, CO.
2016. A Comparison of Bunong Dialects through the Creation of an Audio-Visual Corpus. Carolina Asia Center, UNC – Chapel Hill.
2016. Understanding Dialect Diversity through Spectrographic Comparison: Technology as a Non-Evaluative Medium in the TESOL Classroom. Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching 8, University of Calgary.
2015. Sesquisyllables and the Communist Other: Considerations of the Southeast Asian Linguistic Area. Linguistics department invited talk, University of Georgia.
2015. Deconstructing the Southeast Asian Sesquisyllable. Friday Linguistics Colloquia, UNC – Chapel Hill.
2015. The Commodification of Southernness as Counter-Hegemonic Resistance. Southeastern Writing Center Association Conference, Lipscomb
University.
2013. The Nonequivalence of Phonological Categories and Phonetics in Burmese. MOT Phonology Workshop, University of Ottawa.
2013. Half-syllables in Two Southeast Asian Languages. Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Brown Bag Lecture Series.
2013. A Gestural Interpretation of Variation and Variability in Minor Syllables. The 87th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.
2012. A Gestural Deconstruction of the Minor Syllable. Mainland Southeast Asian Languages: The State of the Art in 2012, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
2012. Intrusive Schwa in Khmer. The 13th Conference on Laboratory Phonology, University of Stuttgart.
2012. A Gestural Account of Minor Syllables: Evidence from Khmer. The 48th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society.
2011. Unary Stress as a Result of Coupled Oscillators. The 2nd UConn Workshop on Stress and Accent.
2011. A Reanalysis of Minor Syllables: The Interaction of Word Maximality and Positional Markedness. Southeast Asian Linguistics Society XXI, Kasetsart University.
2010. Registrogenesis in Bunong: The Interaction of Phonetics and Phonology. Workshop on Sound Change, Institut d’Estudis Catalans.
2010. Degar Identity and Language. Southeast Asia Program Graduate Student Symposium, Cornell University.
2010. The Sesquisyllable as a Disyllabic Word. CUNY Conference on the Word in Phonology.
2005. The Pharyngeal Hierarchy: A Solution to the Blocking of Emphasis Spread in Arabic. University of Texas at Arlington Student Conference in Linguistics.
Research Languages
Bunong (cmo)
Khmer
Vietnamese
Burmese
Arabic
Spanish
