The Panelists

Mariška Bolyanatz Brown is an Assistant Professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles in the Department of Spanish & French Studies. She completed her PhD in Hispanic Linguistics at UCLA in 2017, specializing in Spanish sociophonetics. At Occidental she regularly teaches language classes, linguistics classes in Spanish (such as Spanish Sociolinguistics and Spanish in the United States), and linguistics classes in English (such as Intro to Ling and Phonetics).

Jane Chandlee is an Assistant Professor in the Tri-Co Department of Linguistics at Haverford College, which is part of a consortium with nearby Swarthmore College and Bryn Mawr College. She completed her PhD in Linguistics at the University of Delaware in 2014, specializing in computational approaches to phonological typology and learning. At Haverford she regularly teaches courses in the linguistics core curriculum, as well as cross-listed interdisciplinary courses in computer science and linguistics including introductory programming for linguists and speech technology.

Holman Tse is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and International Languages at St. Catherine University where he teaches general linguistics, sociolinguistics, and writing-intensive courses. He is both a linguist by academic training (PhD, University of Pittsburgh; MA, University of Chicago) and a polyglot who speaks Spanish, French, Cantonese, English, and a few other languages. As a Phi Beta Kappa graduate (University of California – Santa Cruz) with a BA in anthropology, he is committed to teaching a broad interdisciplinary perspective of language. His research interests include sound change, language contact, and heritage language phonetics and phonology.

Cynthia Hansen is an Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Anthropology department at Grinnell College. She completed her PhD in Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin in 2011, focusing on the morphosyntax of Iquito, an endangered language of the Peruvian Amazon. During her nine years at Grinnell, she has grown the Linguistics Concentration from a handful of electives across multiple departments to a full slate of core courses, including Syntax, Phonetics and Phonology, Linguistic Typology, Language Change, and Advanced Linguistic Analysis, as well as an anthropology course on language change, and an interdisciplinary collaboration with the Theatre and Dance department. This past year she transitioned to the role of Associate Dean for Student Academic Life.

Donna Jo Napoli is Professor of Linguistics and Social Justice at Swarthmore College. Her degrees are from Harvard (BA mathematics; PhD Romance Languages and Literatures), with a postdoc at MIT (Linguistics). For years she published in syntax, mainly on Italian. Then she branched into sign languages, where she works on all components of the grammar. She is on a team that advocates for the language rights of deaf children and is co-director of the RISE website, which produces bimodal-bilingual video-books. She applies methodologies of linguistics to the analysis of dance and yoga. She is also a writer, having published over 80 books for young people.

Mark Phelan is Associate Professor and chair of the Philosophy Department at Lawrence University, where he also contributes to the Linguistics and Cognitive Science Programs. He completed a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and, before coming to Lawrence, was a teaching fellow in cognitive science at Yale. In linguistics, his work primarily focuses on pragmatics, particularly, on the ways in which knowledge of normative features of language use is exploited by speakers to create meaning and influence audiences. He contributes courses in pragmatics and symbolic logic to the Linguistics Program at Lawrence.