I am an Assistant Professor of Spanish Sociolinguistics in the Department of Modern Languages. As an Applied Sociolinguist and Linguistic Anthropologist, I study the intersections of language, identity, and embodiment especially within contexts of second language learning, teaching, and use.
I examine many topics through interdisciplinary frameworks, including discourses of Blackness in the Americas, transnational identity constructions of Black Americans in Mexico, inter-ethnic tensions and alliances within Black/Latinx communities, embodied/linguistic processes of racialization and gendering, discourses of second language learning and education abroad, Spanish as a local language, racialized and gendered sociolinguistic choices of non-Latinx Spanish learners, among others.
I rely on various qualitative research methods, namely digital, auto- and institutional ethnography, sociolinguistic and ethnographic interviews, ethnographic observations and field notes, focus groups, questionnaires, archival and narrative inquiry, and multimodal discourse analysis of texts, images, and embodiment.
Currently, I'm focused on several projects that examine the roles of learners' embodied identities, positionalities, and subjectivities when it comes to the sociolinguistic variation they come across, adopt, and reject in Spanish speaking contexts. For instance, one of my projects aims to use critical linguistic autoethnography as a method for Spanish learners (heritage and non-heritage speakers) to learn and investigate variations of Spanish in their localized and global communities by bridging their experience with critical analytical tools in linguistics
I am excited about cross-disciplinary collaborations. I'm also invested in teaching and research practices that help undergrads/grads directly apply what they learn to issues they want to solve in their communities.
research interests
Spanish Sociolinguistics, Linguistic Anthropology, Second Language Acquisition, L2 Spanish Learning and Use in the U.S.
