Bienvenue !
I am an Assistant Teaching Professor of French in the World Languages Center at Northeastern University where I teach courses in French language, French culture, and French linguistics.
My research program explores questions at the interface of phonological variation, sociolinguistics, and second language acquisition using corpora and methods from machine learning, the digital humanities, theoretical phonology, and cognitive science. I am particularly interested in what ways and to what extent sociolinguistic variation interacts with what has traditionally been described as "free" or phonological variation and how these phenomena influence how languages are taught and learned.
I completed my PhD in French Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin in 2020, where my dissertation, under the direction of Prof. Barbara Bullock, employed quantitative and machine learning tools to analyze schwa data from the Projet PFC Corpus with the goal of proffering a more granular and thorough understanding of what affects the realization of the French schwa or e-muet (ie Je suis vs J'suis) in Contemporary Metropolitan French.
Funded by the generous support of a Bourse Chateaubriand, I have also spent time as a visiting researcher at the Laboratoire Modèles, Dynamiques, Corpus (MoDyCo) at Université Paris Nanterre in 2018, where I worked closely with Prof. Bernard Laks to conceptualize a definition of the e-muet based on current and past theoretical research. My time at MoDyCo resulted in the beginning of my dissertation research, as well as a chapter coauthored with Dr. Laks which explores how schwa has evolved historically and how the research on schwa has evolved along with it.