Welcome! I am a visiting assistant professor of linguistics at the Department of Anthropology at Oberlin College and an associate at the Department of Linguistics at Harvard University. My research and teaching interests lie in sociolinguistics, phonetics, and linguistic anthropology. My research is driven by these big questions:

I hold a PhD from Stanford University. My dissertation focused on the embodied linguistic styles of prominent social types in Beijing (e.g. Neighborhood Grandma). My research examined the dynamic prosodic structures in interactions and revealed the dialogic nature of sociolinguistic styles. My dissertation was supervised by Penny Eckert and Rob Podesva. 

I use a wide range of methods to collect linguistic and social data, including but not limited to experiments, interactive games, interviews, fieldwork, focus groups, surveys, and corpora. My analyses combine quantitative analysis of linguistic details and qualitative analysis of social patterns, to (un)cover linguistic structure, meaning-making, and processing. 

A lot of my research concerns speech prosody, which is the "musical" part of language, such as pitch, timing, and voice quality. They are particularly interesting to me for their dynamic and complex nature, and for their role in carrying multi-dimensional linguistic and social meanings. My interests in prosody started in Hong Kong when I worked with Peggy Mok.

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