My name is Catherine (she/her) and I am a sociolinguist based at the University of Munich (LMU), where I earned my PhD and am currently working as a research assistant. I specialize in English. My research interests are variation and change, Central American and Caribbean varieties, World Englishes generally, corpus linguistics and language in film.
I grew up in Quebec, Canada, and moved to Germany in early adulthood. I have been living here since, with my husband. I pursued my education in English studies here and found linguistics. Finding out that my vernacular was in fact linguistically equal to any other was a freeing moment that inspired my career in this field.
I wrote my BA thesis (2014) on Canadians' spelling habits online. My MA thesis (2016) was a diachronic study of modals and semi-modals in Indian English newspapers. It was published as a paper in Journal of English Linguistics in 2022. For my PhD thesis, I aimed to document and describe an endangered variety of English spoken in Panama by descendents of the Panama Canal builders. For this, I conducted fieldwork in Panama City in 2018 and 2019. I defended my dissertation in 2023, and that same year my monograph was published as part of the Varieties of English Around the World (VEAW) series by John Benjamins. My next project involves taking a closer look at the language of historical fiction. My side projects have consisted in collaborations with my department colleagues to explore themes related to variation in World Englishes as well as telecinematic language. You may visit the publications and talks tabs to learn more. I am open to new collaborations, especially related to these fields.