Current Ph.D. Students
To view student websites or contact information, please click on the respective student’s name.
Abdullah Alasmari
Concentration: Theoretical Linguistics
Abdullah joined the Ph.D. program in theoretical concentration in 2022. His research interests include syntax, morphology, and grammaticalization. He is also interested in what the patterns of linguistic change can tell us about Language. Before joining Georgetown, Abdullah earned his M.A. in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics from Arizona State University. He has worked on Passive grammaticalization in Modern Arabic Dialects and Modern Standard Arabic.
Khalid Alharbi
Concentration: Sociolinguistics
Khalid is a Ph.D. student in the sociolinguistics concentration. His current research interests include language variation and change, sociolinguistic perception, and language and politics. Prior to coming to the United States, Khalid worked as an instructor in the English Language Centre at the Institute of Public Administration in Riyadh, before he joined Al-Jouf University, where he currently holds a lecturer position in the English Department.
Talal Alharbi
Concentration: Sociolinguistics
Talal joined the Ph.D. program in 2018. Before coming to Georgetown, he received his M.A. in Linguistics from Ohio University and B.A. in English Language and Translation from the Northern Border University, Saudi Arabia. During his graduate studies, Talal worked as an instructor in the Arabic program at Ohio University. Talal’s research interests include language variation and change, and discourse analysis. He is particularly interested in exploring the perception and evaluation of spoken language variation in Saudi Arabia as well as language use in constructing and displaying religious, gender, and tribal identities on social media platforms in the Saudi Arabian context.
Amani Aloufi
Concentration: Theoretical Linguistics
Amani joined the Ph.D. program in 2016. Her research interests focus on Syntax, Morphology, Semantics, and their interfaces, particularly in Modern Standard Arabic and its dialects. She is also interested in language documentation. She received her M.A. in linguistics from Northeastern Illinois University in the Spring of 2016. Prior to joining NEIU, she completed her B.A. in English at Tiabah University in Madinah, Saudi Arabia where she worked as an instructor for two years.
Hana Altalhi
Concentration: General Linguistics
Hana joined the Ph.D. program in 2018. Before coming to Georgetown, she received her M.A. in Linguistics from Ball State University and her B.A. in English Language from Taif University, Saudi Arabia. Her research interests primarily focus on Syntax and Contrastive Linguistics.
Minnie Annan
Concentration: Sociolinguistics
Minnie’s dissertation explores how speakers of African American Language construct multifaceted local identities through storytelling as well as analyzes vowel centralization in the Washington, DC area. She serves as project coordinator for the Language and Communication in Washington, DC project (LCDC), and her research has been featured on the front page of the Washington Post, and she has been a guest on NPR. Minnie also has an interest in linguistic diversity and awareness and its effects from the classroom to the boardroom. She has conducted workshops for private corporations, service organizations, and various student groups at Georgetown University. Minnie earned her Bachelors and Masters degrees from Georgetown University, and she has lived and worked in the Washington, DC area for the last seven years.
Tatsuya Aoyama
Concentration: General Linguistics
Tatsuya joined the Ph.D. program in General Linguistics in 2020, after receiving a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Soka University of America and an M.A. in TESOL from Michigan State University. Tatsuya’s interests lie in utilizing corpus linguistics and relevant statistical and computational methods to tackle problems in second and foreign language acquisition. His M.A. thesis focused on quantifying the deviation (i.e., non-nativelikeness) of Chinese and Japanese speakers’ use of English articles by analyzing both native speaker and learner corpora.
Bertille Baron
Concentration: Theoretical Linguistics
Bertille joined the Theoretical Linguistics program in the Fall of 2016 after completing a Master of Arts degree in Linguistics at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. During her time at SIUC, she worked as an instructor of French in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, and as an instructor of Academic English for international students in the Department of Linguistics. Bertille’s research interests include African languages, morphophonology, morphosyntax, questions related to the syntax-phonology interface, as well as language documentation and revitalization. Her main research project at the moment focuses on the documentation and analysis of some intonational and prosodic processes in Ikpana, an endangered Gur language spoken in the Volta region of Ghana. She received a BA and an MA in English and American Linguistics, Culture, and Literature from Université de Caen Basse-Normandie (France).
Amelia Becker
Concentration: General Linguistics
Amelia is a Ph.D. student in the general concentration. Her research focuses on the phonetics and phonology of American Sign Language. In particular, she is interested in the role of iconicity in grammar and its implications for the nature of phonological representation, emergent and innate aspects of grammar, and modality-specific characteristics of language. Before coming to Georgetown, she earned her M.A. in Linguistics from Gallaudet University and B.A. in Linguistics and English from The College of William and Mary. In addition to her own research, Amelia enjoys teaching Linguistics courses for undergraduate students. She has taught at both Georgetown and Gallaudet University and is particularly passionate about making the field of Linguistics accessible for Deaf students.
Ho Fai Cheng (Viggo)
Concentration: Sociolinguistics
Viggo joined the Ph.D. program in Sociolinguistics in 2015. His research interests include discourse analysis, intercultural communication, and language and identity. He has previously studied at the University of Amsterdam and the Hong Kong Baptist University, where he graduated with a B.A. in English Language and Literature with a minor in Psychology and an M.A. in Language Studies. Prior to his study at Georgetown, he published an article on intergroup prejudice among university students of culturally-diverse backgrounds and a book review on (in)appropriate online behaviors in computer-mediated discourse.
Mingyeong Choi
Concentration: Theoretical Linguistics
Mingyeong joined the Ph.D. program in theoretical linguistics in 2021. Before studying in the Linguistics department at Georgetown, she completed her MA and BA in the linguistics department at Seoul National University in South Korea. Her interests lie in the areas of semantics, semantics-syntax interfaces, and the philosophy of language. The subjects that interest her most until now include the meaning of attitude verbs (especially desire verbs), conditional, mood, and complementizers, which means her main focus is on intensional semantics. She hopes her future research could help people define their beliefs and hopes more clearly.
Kris Cook
Concentration: General Linguistics
Kris holds a B.S. in Psychology & Education (Northeastern University) and an M.Ed. in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL; Lesley University). Prior to joining the General Concentration at Georgetown in 2020, she taught for over a decade in a variety of contexts (e.g., ESL in Japan, study abroad in Spain, U.S. K-8 public schools, online ESL lessons internationally), including as a Lecturer for the Master of Science in Curriculum & Instruction program in the College of Education at Purdue University. Her research interests include language learning-related anxiety, SLA in synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) contexts, and L2 learners’ navigation of features of intercultural politeness and pragmatic competence, such as taking turn-taking, requests, and apologies. Personal website: https://www.krisleighcook.com/ (new window)
Keith Cunningham
Concentration: General Linguistics
Keith is a Ph.D. student in the General concentration specializing in computational linguistics for endangered language documentation and revitalization. He is particularly interested in the American Indian language families of Algonquian, Siouan, and Na-Dene. His computational linguistics interests include treebanks, computational historical linguistics, and word embeddings. He applies these techniques to produce learning materials for heritage learners based on archival language resources.
Felipe De Jesus
Concentration: Sociolinguistics
Felipe holds a B.A. and an M.A. in English Language and Literature from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil). Prior to joining the Sociolinguistics program at Georgetown in 2017, he taught in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University, where he held a Fulbright fellowship. He is also an experienced EFL instructor, having taught English at the college level for over six years in Brazil. His research interests include methods and applications of Interactional Sociolinguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis around issues of power relations and identity construction, especially within the area of language, gender, and sexuality. He has presented at a number of major national and international conferences in the field of Sociolinguistics. He has also published book reviews in Language in Society and Gender & Language, and research articles in the International Journal of Language Studies and Gender & Language.
Helen Dominic
Concentration: Sociolinguistics
Helen’s interests include language variation, discourse analysis, and critical theory. She is currently studying variation in the Tamil diasporic community and how that affects dialectical concepts of purity and pollution in language and society. Prior to joining the Ph.D. program in 2018, Helen received her B.A. in Linguistics from the National University of Singapore.
John Terry Dundon
Concentration: Sociolinguistics
John joined the Ph.D. program in Sociolinguistics in 2021. His research interests include language policy, the intersections of law and language, discourse analysis, and endangered language preservation (particularly the Pamiri languages of Tajikistan and Afghanistan). John is also a full-time faculty member at Georgetown Law, where he teaches classes on U.S. legal research & writing, contract drafting, U.S. constitutional law, and academic legal English. He has a B.A. in French and philosophy from the University of Virginia, a J.D. from the George Washington University Law School, and an M.A. in applied linguistics from Columbia University.
Ferdinand Duru
Concentration: Theoretical Linguistics
Ferdinand joined the Ph.D. program in Theoretical Linguistics in 2022. Before coming to Georgetown University, he received his MA in Linguistics from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, and his BA in Linguistics from the University of Benin, all in Nigeria. His research interests include syntax, syntax-semantics interface, and morphology-semantics interface. He is particularly interested in “Igbo verbs, Argumentation and complementation”. Ferdinand is also interested in Language documentation. Prior to his coming to the United States, he worked as an Assistant Lecturer in the Department of linguistics, at the University of Benin, Nigeria. In his leisure time, Ferdinand enjoys soccer and biking.
Rima Elabdali
Concentration: General Linguistics
Rima Elabdali joined the Ph.D. program in 2018 after receiving an MA in TESOL from Portland State University. Prior to starting the program, Rima worked as an ESL teacher and tutor at Portland State University. Her research interests include but are not limited to second language acquisition, task-based language learning, and second language (L2) writing. She is especially interested in using corpus tools to study the rhetorical structure of L2 writing. Rima is also interested in conducting sociolinguistic research on the oral interaction of L2 tutoring sessions.
Lydia Felice
Concentration: Theoretical Linguistics
Lydia joined the Ph.D. program in 2017. Her research interests include morphology, syntax, and the morphology/phonology interface. Much of her work focuses on Afroasiatic languages, including Berber and Tigre. Her current research projects investigate the relationship between morphosyntactic structure and phonological processes, with an emphasis on nominal morphology. She is also interested in the case, clitic doubling, and head movement. Before joining the program, Lydia received her B.A. in Linguistics from McGill University.
Erin Fell
Concentration: Applied Linguistics
Erin joined the Ph.D. program in 2020. Her primary research interests include task-based language teaching, classroom-based research, and L2 development. Before coming to Georgetown, she earned a BA in French: Secondary Education from Louisiana State University and taught for three years at a Title I magnet high school in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In the classroom, she’s particularly passionate about community building, learner identity, and connecting instruction to real-world language tasks.
Alexandra Gehrke
Concentration: Applied Linguistics
Alexandra joined the Ph.D. program in 2020, having completed an MA in Applied Linguistics and Intercultural Studies at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth in 2020 and a BA in English Language and Literature at Newcastle University in 2019. Her research interests include L2+ acquisition, individual differences with a focus on language aptitude, and language aptitude testing. She has previously worked on research testing the Modern Language Aptitude Test. Currently, Alexandra is working on gaining a new understanding of the concept of language aptitude as an improvable attribute.
Luke Gessler
Concentration: Computational Linguistics
Luke’s interests lie in computational and documentary linguistics. He is currently focused on using software and computational methods to develop more effective language documentation methodologies. Luke holds a B.A. in computer science and linguistics and worked as a software engineer for two years before joining the Ph.D. program in 2018.
Saurav Goswami
Concentration: Applied Linguistics
Saurav is a Ph.D. student in Applied Linguistics. Over the past 10 years, he has been teaching critical writing, rhetoric, and communication to graduate students across India and Nigeria. He has also worked with writing pedagogy and writing center administration. At Georgetown, his primary areas of research are critical multilingual studies and critical language policy with a focus on the vastly plurilingual region of North East India. He is also exploring disciplinary links between L2 and L3 writing studies, and language acquisition. Saurav is interested in making inquiries into multilingual social practice from many approaches, especially LGBTQI+ lived experiences, discourse analysis, and institutional ethnography.
Amber Hall
Concentration: General Linguistics
Amber joined the Ph.D. program in 2019 as a Patrick Healy Fellow. She holds a B.A. in Linguistics and Cultural Anthropology from Duke University. Her research interests include language instruction in special education, language documentation, and American Sign Language.
Adrienne Isaac
Concentration: Sociolinguistics
Adrienne is a doctoral candidate in sociolinguistics. Her research focuses on mundane interactions involving individuals with neurobehavioral and psychiatric conditions, such as frontotemporal dementia and schizophrenia, to better understand the role of social and distributed cognition in interaction. She uses ethnographic video recordings to engage in embodied interaction analysis, conversation analysis, and discourse analysis methods. She received her BA and MA degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Nishita Grace Isaac
Concentration: Applied Linguistics
Nishita Grace joined the Ph.D. program in applied linguistics concentration in 2021. Prior to this, she worked as a researcher in India for 2 years. Her work focuses on tribal education in central India. She is interested in studying various aspects of multilingual education, specifically for children coming from Indigenous communities. She is also interested in studying language policies, the use of translanguaging in classrooms, and second language acquisition. She completed her Master’s in English Language Teaching in 2019 from The English and Foreign Languages University, India.
Abigail Jarvis
Concentration: Sociolinguistics
Abigail Jarvis joined the Sociolinguistics Ph.D. program in 2022 after earning her B.A. with a double major in Linguistics and Spanish from the University of Southern California. Her research interests include topics such as language and identity, language and media, bilingualism, and performative linguistics. She has presented her individual research at several national linguistic conferences and has written and developed a linguistically inclusive, sociolinguistically oriented writing curriculum that is still being taught at USC. She currently works with sociophonetic data in her role as a Research Assistant for Dr. Jennifer Nycz.
Yoojin Kang
Concentration: Sociolinguistics
Yoojin Kang joined the Ph.D. program in 2017. Prior to enrolling at Georgetown, she worked as an associate researcher in the Korean Language and Culture Center, which is affiliated with the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, and previous work includes new dialect formation in industrial towns in Korea, second dialect acquisition by Seoul dialect speakers and perceptual dialectology of Gyeongsang province. She has participated in Dr. Nycz’s research group, and she is currently interested in how linguistic and social factors affect the acquisition of new dialect features.
Jungyoon Koh
Concentration: Sociolinguistics
Jungyoon joined the Ph.D. program in Sociolinguistics in 2020. Her research interests include computer-mediated discourse analysis, language and identity, and multimodal interaction. She is particularly interested in examining the incorporation of multimodal materials into the linguistic practices of online communities and their role in creating involvement between speakers and their virtual audiences. Jungyoon received her M.A. in Language and Communication from Georgetown University and her B.A. in English Language and Literature, with a minor in Communication, from Seoul National University.
Jessica Kotfila
Concentration: General Linguistics/Cognitive Science
Jessica received her B.A. in Linguistics and Psychology from Smith College in 2018. Her primary research interests are in child language acquisition and learning. Her research focuses on the relationship between language structure and language learning. Specifically, how syntactic constraints and principles found in many of the world’s languages affect language learning in adults and children.
Yunjung Ku
Concentration: Applied Linguistics
Yunjung joined the Ph.D. program in Applied Linguistics in 2020. Before coming to Georgetown, she received her M. A. in English Education from Korea University and her B. A. with a double major in English Linguistics and Psychology from Ewha Womans University, with the highest distinction, summa cum laude. Her master’s thesis explored diverse uses of emotion collocations among native speakers by investigating how the meaning of emotional words is affected by the situational context of an utterance. She published articles in English Language and Linguistics and Modern English Education. Yunjung’s current research interests include interactional feedback, task-based language teaching, and multimedia-assisted language learning. She is particularly interested in the contributing factors that impact the efficacy of interaction in promoting learners’ performances.
Lauren Levine
Concentration: Computational Linguistics
Lauren joined the Ph.D. program in Computational Linguistics in 2021. Her current research interests include Corpus Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, and Multilingual HLT. Before coming to Georgetown, Lauren worked as a Software Engineer and a Computational Linguist at the MITRE Corporation. She received her B.A. with a triple major in Linguistics, Computer Science, and Asian Studies, and a minor in Cognitive Science from Cornell University in 2018.
Xiang Li
Concentration: Theoretical Linguistics
Xiang joined the Ph.D. program in Theoretical Linguistics in 2020. Before coming to Georgetown, she received a B.A. from Beihang University in China and two M.A. from University College London in the UK. Her research interests mainly lie in morphology and syntax/ semantics interface. She also works on the comparative study of English and Mandarin. Her M.A. thesis explored the syntactic structure of resultative constructions in English and Mandarin (including both V-V compounds and V-de constructions in Mandarin).
Yi-Ju Lin (Jessica)
Concentration: Computational Linguistics
Jessica joined the Ph.D. program in 2020. Before coming to Georgetown, she received her M.A. in Linguistics from National Taiwan University, Taiwan, and B.A. in Applied Chinese Language and Culture from National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan. Her research interests include text analytics, corpus linguistics and annotation, and societal applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Her current research focuses on multimodal humor detection. Jessica’s master’s thesis deals with predicting dark humor intensity within internet memes.
Ke Lin
Concentration: Sociolinguistics
Ke Lin joined the Ph.D. program in Sociolinguistics in 2020, after completing an M.A. in Slavic and Eastern European Studies with a concentration in Linguistics at The Ohio State University. During her graduate studies at OSU, she also taught Russian 1101 and 1102. Her Masters thesis investigated the perceptions and social evaluations of non-native accents in the Russian context. At the doctoral level, she is interested in exploring the role of language attitude in perception and production, and particularly how this relationship manifests in diaspora communities. Her other research interests include cross-cultural (mis)communication and politeness theory. Outside of her academic endeavors, she is a freelance medical interpreter. In her leisure time, Ke enjoys ballroom dancing and hiking.
Josh Linden
Concentration: Theoretical Linguistics
Josh joined the Ph.D. program in 2020. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College and a Master’s degree in Linguistics from Wayne State University. His research in theoretical syntax has focused on ellipsis. He has also studied the use of capitalization on the English-speaking Internet and compared the language habits of anglophone queer communities. He hopes to continue to explore the cognitive processes that underlie language, as well as the ways in which language and technology adapt to suit each other.
Yang Liu (Janet)
Concentration: Computational Linguistics
Janet joined the Ph.D. program in 2019 after completing an MS in Computational Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her research interests include computational discourse modeling with a primary focus on discourse relations and relation signaling, syntactic/semantic representations across formalisms, and corpus linguistics and annotation. She is a member of the Corpling research lab and a student affiliate of the NERT research lab. Prior to studying at Georgetown, Janet majored in Linguistics at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and received her B.A. in English (Business Translation) from the Capital University of Economics and Business in Beijing, China.
Personal Website: https://janetlauyeung.github.io/
Zhuosi Luo
Concentration: Theoretical Linguistics, Cognitive Science
Zhuosi joined the Ph.D. program in 2019. Before coming to Georgetown, she received her M.A. and B.A. from China Foreign Affairs University. Besides, she received her linguistics education in syntax and cartographic study in the research team ‘Linguistics at Wudaokou Station’ of the Department of Linguistics at Beijing Language and Culture University from 2017 to 2019. With Teochew, Cantonese, and Mandarin as well as other languages like Thai as linguistic data, her research interests include syntax, syntax-semantics interface, and syntax-phonology interface study. She is also interested in language and cognition. Personal website: https://zhuosiluo.com/
Katelyn MacDougald
Concentration: Sociolinguistics
Katelyn joined the Ph.D. program in Sociolinguistics in 2016. Her primary research interests lie at the intersection between discourse analysis and syntactic theory, with past work focusing on ellipsis, prestige constructions, epistemic indefinite, and the clausal periphery. Other general areas of interest include narrative analysis, discourse pragmatics, syntactic cartography, and language planning. Before coming to Georgetown, Katelyn studied Linguistics at New York University while simultaneously earning an M.A. in Sociology from Columbia University. She also holds an M.A. in History and a B.A. in Classics and Religious Studies, both from Brown University.
Jordan MacKenzie
Concentration: Sociolinguistics
Jordan MacKenzie joined the Ph.D. program in 2018 after one year as a lecturer in Swahili at the University of Florida. He is principally interested in English in Cuba and Florida, but also in writing systems, pregón, linguistic landscapes, Yorùbá in the Americas, and documentation of Kidaw’ida [dav] and Kimakunduchi [swa]. He has received fellowships to study French, Swahili, and Yorùbá, and completed a Fulbright research grant in Trinidad, studying tropical fruit nomenclature. Jordan holds an MA in Linguistics from the University of Florida and is the copy editor of the Yorùbá Studies Review.
Nicholas Mararac
Concentration: Sociolinguistics
Nick is a U.S. Navy veteran and joined the Ph.D. program in 2019. His research interests include narrative and conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, and language and identity. He primarily studies the language of leadership or discursive leadership in the military. Nick’s master’s thesis examined the leadership styles of U.S. Naval Officers of marginalized gender and sexual identities. Much of his research is informed by his experience as a Surface Warfare Officer in the U.S. Navy during Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Nick received his B.S. in International Relations and a minor in Chinese language from the United States Naval Academy (’07) and his M.S. in Sociolinguistics from Georgetown University (’19). He currently works in the Georgetown University Veterans Office assisting incoming military-connected students.
Christiana McGrady
Concentration: Theoretical Linguistics
Christiana is a Ph.D. student in Theoretical Linguistics. Her research interests include phonology, morphology, and syntax. She is interested in the interaction between prosody and morphology in primarily Western Slavic Languages and has also worked on Russian unaccusative syntax. Christiana joined the Ph.D. Program at Georgetown in 2017. She received her B.A. in Applied Linguistics and Russian Language, with a Certificate of Advanced Proficiency in Russian, from Portland State University in 2011.
Lynn Nakazawa
Concentration: Applied Linguistics
Lynn joined the Ph.D. program in the applied linguistics concentration in 2021. Her research interests include second language acquisition, second language teacher education, and program evaluation. Specifically, she is interested in how teacher training programs can be leveraged to better support the second language development of language teachers in international contexts. Before coming to Georgetown, she taught in Malaysia as a Fellow through the English Language Fellow Program and in Taiwan as a TEFL Trainer and Advisor for the Fulbright Taiwan English Teaching Assistant (ETA) Program. She received her master’s degree in TESOL from the University of Pennsylvania.
Siyao Peng (Logan)
Concentration: Computational Linguistics
Siyao joined the Ph.D. program in computational linguistics in 2017. His current interests lie in computational methods and corpus linguistics. At Georgetown, he worked on dependency grammar and conversions among grammar formalisms. Siyao received a B.A. in linguistics, applied mathematics, and French from UC Berkeley in 2015, followed by an M.A. in language diversity from Leiden University (Universiteit Leiden) in 2016.
Personal Website: http://logan-siyao-peng.github.io (new window)
Caitlyn Pineault
Concentration: Applied Linguistics
Caitlyn joined the Ph.D. program in Applied Linguistics in the Fall of 2022. Her research interests include task-based language teaching, (instructed) second language acquisition, the researcher-teacher interface, heritage language development, and world language teacher education. Prior to beginning her graduate career at Georgetown, Caitlyn taught English as a world/additional language in Estado de México, Mexico as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant and at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music as an adjunct instructor, respectively. She also taught high school Spanish at Culver Academies. Caitlyn received her master’s degree in Applied Linguistics from Georgetown and her bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Studies from Oberlin College.
Jack Pruett
Concentration: Theoretical Linguistics
Jack joined the Ph.D. program in the Theoretical Linguistics concentration in 2021. His undergraduate research was focused on Morphology specifically in Irish and Basque. His interests include Morphology, Phonology, and the interface between Morphosyntax and Phonology, primarily focusing on phenomena of nonconcatenative morphology where phonological alternations express morphosyntactic information. As well as working on Morphology, Jack has done fieldwork on Basque and has secondary interests in fieldwork and language documentation. Before coming to Georgetown, he received his B.A. in linguistics from Washington University in St. Louis, as well as studying Spanish and Latin American Studies and Arabic and Islamic Studies.
Derek Reagan
Concentration: Applied Linguistics
Derek joined the Ph.D. program in 2018. His current research interests include but are not limited to second language development, L2 pedagogy, task-based language teaching and learning, and second language pragmatics. He previously studied at the University of Idaho where he received a B.A. in English Literature and Spanish as a Foreign Language as well as an M.A. in TESL. Prior to his arrival at Georgetown, he completed a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte in Natal, Brazil.
Travis Richardson
Concentration: Sociolinguistics
Travis joined the Ph.D. program in Sociolinguistics in 2022. He uses a mixed-methods variationist and discourse analytic approach to analyzing the sociolinguistic factors driving contemporary revitalization efforts of Indigenous and minority languages around the world – especially Māori, Hawai’ian, Basque, and Chuvash. Primary issues of interest for him include decolonizing linguistics, phonological variation among ‘new speakers’ (O’Rourke & Pujolar, 2013) of Indigenous/minority languages, generational differences in language purism ideologies, and how these issues combine to shape language standardization and mentalities about language access. Before returning to Georgetown to pursue his Ph.D., Travis taught English in Japan, served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kyrgyzstan and Montenegro, and collaborated with elders and Native linguists to create middle school language curricula for Chuvash (Chuvashia, Russia) and Zuni (New Mexico, USA).
Ayşenur Sağdıç
Concentration: Applied Linguistics
Ayşenur’s primary research area is classroom-based adult second language acquisition with a particular emphasis on second language pragmatic development, instruction, and assessment. She holds a Bachelor’s in Foreign Language Education, a Master’s in TESL (Applied Linguistics focus), and a Cambridge ICELT certification. Ayşenur has several years of experience in teaching EFL and ESL learners for academic purposes at various language proficiency levels as well as in teaching English composition and writing skills to US undergraduates.
Bradford Salen
Concentration: General Linguistics
Bradford joined the Ph.D. program in 2018. He received his B.A. in Linguistics and his M.A. in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) from the University of Maryland. His research interests include computational approaches to second language processing, L1 acquisition, and psycholinguistics.
Negar Siyari
Concentration: Applied Linguistics
Negar joined the Ph.D. program in Applied Linguistics in the Fall of 2019. Her research interests include language testing and assessment, social justice, and teacher education. Currently, she is a graduate research assistant at the Assessment and Evaluation Language Resource Center (AELRC) in the department of Linguistics at Georgetown. Negar received her M.A. degree in English as a Second Language at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona in the Spring of 2019. Prior to graduate school, she completed her B.A. in English literature at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, Iran.
Lexi Slome
Concentration: Sociolinguistics
Lexi joined the Ph.D. program in sociolinguistics in 2019. Her research interests include discourse analysis and forensic linguistics, particularly authorship comparison and other forms of evidence analysis as well as courtroom discourse. She previously studied at Washington University in St. Louis where she graduated with a B.A. in Linguistics and Psychology. While at Washington University she worked on various linguistic and psycholinguistic projects, including a thesis examining variation in the syntactic mobility of idioms.
Malik Stevenson
Concentration: Applied Linguistics
Malik joined the Ph.D. program in Applied Linguistics in the Fall of 2019. His research interests include second language acquisition, language policy, and language teaching. Prior to Georgetown, he worked in education as a Spanish teacher and English as a Second Language teacher for D.C. Public Schools. In addition, Malik studied at the Xavier University of Louisiana where he received his BA in Spanish, and at Notre Dame of Maryland University where he received an MA in TESOL.
Şeyma Toker
Concentration: Applied Linguistics
Şeyma joined the Ph.D. program in Applied Linguistics in 2018. She received an M.A. in TESL from Pennsylvania State University and a B.A. in ELT from Middle East Technical University. Her research interests include critical multilingualism, migration, identity, and social justice in SLA. She is particularly interested in the language practices of marginalized multilingual in migration contexts such as refugee populations. Prior to coming to Georgetown, Şeyma worked as a language instructor at the university level for five years and taught several ESL, EAP, and EFL courses at Penn State and Bilkent University.
Erin Tirpak
Concentration: Theoretical Linguistics
Erin joined the theoretical Ph.D. program in 2022. Her interests lie in syntax and semantics, with previous research focused on the interaction between optionality, imperative, and coordination. Before coming to Georgetown, Erin earned a BA at New York University, studying Linguistics and Mathematics.
Alexus Wells
Concentration: Sociolinguistics
Alexus joined the Ph.D. program in 2019. She received her B.A. in Linguistics and Theater Studies from Duke University. As an undergraduate, Alexus was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and conducted independent research focusing on Afro-Latina Rappers and Instagram. Her research interests include discourse analysis, online discourse and social media, language and identity, and Hip-Hop scholarship.
Hannah Fedder Williams
Concentration: Sociolinguistics
Hannah joined the Ph.D. program in Sociolinguistics in 2021. Her current research centers on police-civilian communication, focusing on how both police officers and civilians perceive encounters with one another and reconstruct their experiences in narrative discourse. She is also more broadly interested in applying methods of discourse analysis and Conversation Analysis (CA) to talk-in-interaction in other legal contexts. She previously studied Linguistics and Arabic at Aarhus University in Denmark, where she received her B.A. While at Aarhus University, she wrote her thesis on the use of the imperative mood in Danish threatening letters. Prior to joining the program, Hannah also worked as an editor in the Spanish department at a Danish-based publishing house for instructional materials for high school students for 5 years.
Ping Hei Yeung
Concentration: General Linguistics
Ping Hei joined the Ph.D. program in General Linguistics in 2021 after receiving his B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Hong Kong. He is interested in language contact and the variation of post-colonial societies in the Asia-Pacific, especially in how the colonial languages develop and interact with the local languages. One of his main research projects at the moment is sociophonetic variation in Hong Kong English. His previous research includes an articulatory study on affricate palatalization, an ongoing sound change in Cantonese.
Luopeng Zheng
Concentration: Theoretical Linguistics
Luopeng joined the Ph.D. program in theoretical linguistics in the Fall of 2019. He is interested in phonetics, phonology, and Optimality Theory. Specifically, he is interested in the formal modeling and experimental investigations of tone, drawing on data from typologically different languages ranging from understudied African languages such as Ga and Igbo to less-studied East Asian languages such as Cantonese. He received a BA in Asian Studies with the honor of summa cum laude from the University of San Francisco in 2015. Prior to coming to Georgetown, he studied at the University of Delaware at the doctoral level, and at the University of Iowa and the University of Oxford at Masters level.
Yilun Zhu
Concentration: General Linguistics
Yilun is a Ph.D. student with a General Concentration specializing in computational linguistics. His research interests lie in how semantic, syntactic, and discourse features are represented in computational linguistics/natural language processing. Yilun is currently working on coreference, paraphrasing, and adpositional supersenses. Prior to the program, He received a B.A. from Nanjing University in 2017, followed by a M.S. in Linguistics from Georgetown University in 2019.