I love working with graduate students, and am particularly equipped & excited to supervise students working on phonetic and phonological variation, language acquisition, language change over the lifespan, second dialect acquisition, and language & place. Typically my students enroll in the Georgetown PhD program as part of the Sociolinguistics concentration, though I often serve on dissertation committees for those in the Theoretical Linguistics concentration as well. As of July 2022, I am serving as the Head of the Sociolinguistics concentration.
If you have general questions about the PhD program in the Department of Linguistics, please first read our web page for prospective students. If your question isn't answered there, please contact the Graduate Program Coordinator, Erin Esch Pereira. Note that PhD admissions at Georgetown are done centrally, at the department level, and not by applying to specific faculty members. If your research interests are closely aligned with mine (to the point that you've read some of my work), I would be happy to correspond with you directly so you can get a sense of whether you'd like to work with me.
Some things about me as a graduate advisor and what I value:
I aim to give my students the support and perspective they need to produce meaty, intriguing, rigorous academic work while also maintaining a good life (which includes physical and mental health).
I want my students to cultivate the skills to succeed in whatever career path they choose, whether that’s academia, industry, or something else (Given our alt-ac-oriented MLC programming and location in Washington, DC, Georgetown is a great place to build a pluripotent career foundation, by the way.)
As a first-gen college student and academic, I am aware that the myriad subtle yet crucial-to-master conventions of academia are not innate or obvious, and I do my best to help students navigate and learn them.