I am a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University. I specialize in the documentation, description, and revitalization of Indigenous languages of the Americas. My other areas of interest include cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, multimodality, sociolinguistics, and anthropology.
I hold a PhD from the University of Alberta as well as MA and BA degrees in Linguistics from Brigham Young University and my professional background is in the translation and localization industry. My native language is English, I am a fluent speaker of Spanish and posses intermediate fluency in Ecuadorian Quechua (Kichwa/Quichua).
As a usage-based descriptive linguist, I seek to not only describe features and constructions that languages have, but rather, describe what people do with language and how their language use relates to their cultural and material conditions.