My life
I am a native of southern Connecticut in the US, growing up in the town of Orange, just outside New Haven. I went to Middlebury College, intending to be a middle-school French teacher, and I majored in French and Spanish. By the end of my first year there, I realized I enjoyed learning about linguistics much more than I wanted to teach any language, so I changed my focus and spent as much time as I could learning about linguistics. During my time as an undergraduate, I studied at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago and at the Université de Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle during the academic year 2004-2005. I graduated in May 2006, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. My senior year theses were on French language policy toward minority languages and on the discourse of homeless men in Santiago de Chile.
I began my studies at Indiana University-Bloomington in the fall of 2006, where I studied Linguistics and French Linguistics, with a minor in Anthropology. I was the first recipient of the Marvin D. Moody First-Year Fellowship in French Linguistics, and have also taught introductory French and linguistics classes. I served for several years as a research assistant at the IU Creole Institute, under the direction of Albert Valdman, working on a differential dictionary of Louisiana French as well as on an NSF research project on variation in the Haitian Creole of the Cap Haïtien area. My interest as an undergraduate in both France and South America, along with IU's strengths in the teaching and study of Haitian Creole, is what has led to my interest in French Guiana and the resulting dissertation fieldwork (completed thanks to grants from the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies as well as the Gertrude Weathers Dissertation Fellowship), which focuses on code-switching between French and two closely related creoles spoken in Cayenne, Haitian and Guianese French Creoles. During this time, I also started to create a dictionary and grammar of Guianese French Creole, though these are long-term projects to be completed after the dissertation. The goal, however, is to create the first complete grammar and dictionary based on the available written data as well as spoken data collected during fieldwork. In addition, I have presented recently on topics such as sociolinguistic variation in Northern Haitian Creole, vocabulary extraction in L2 French, the history of dictionaries of linguistics, and rates of borrowing in the Francophone gay press. In January 2014, I joined the faculty of the University of the West Indies-Cave Hill in Barbados, where I am Research Fellow in Lexicography and Director of the Centre for Caribbean Lexicography in the Department of Language, Linguistics and Literatures in English.
In my spare time, I have served as an officer in the Indiana University Linguistics Club, having been treasurer and colloquium coordinator. I have also served on the French & Italian Graduate Student Organization and as departmental representative to the university-wide Graduate & Professional Student Organization for each department I was in. I also enjoy singing, having grown up in the Trinity Church on the Green Choir of Men & Boys in New Haven. In Indiana, I have had the great fortune to belong to the Bloomington Chamber Singers, of which I was the Board President for the first half of the 2013-2014 season. I also enjoy life at home with my dog and cat.
Pictured above: A gate near Montabo Hill in Cayenne. Buildings on the Cayenne campus of the University of the Antilles-French Guiana.
I began my studies at Indiana University-Bloomington in the fall of 2006, where I studied Linguistics and French Linguistics, with a minor in Anthropology. I was the first recipient of the Marvin D. Moody First-Year Fellowship in French Linguistics, and have also taught introductory French and linguistics classes. I served for several years as a research assistant at the IU Creole Institute, under the direction of Albert Valdman, working on a differential dictionary of Louisiana French as well as on an NSF research project on variation in the Haitian Creole of the Cap Haïtien area. My interest as an undergraduate in both France and South America, along with IU's strengths in the teaching and study of Haitian Creole, is what has led to my interest in French Guiana and the resulting dissertation fieldwork (completed thanks to grants from the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies as well as the Gertrude Weathers Dissertation Fellowship), which focuses on code-switching between French and two closely related creoles spoken in Cayenne, Haitian and Guianese French Creoles. During this time, I also started to create a dictionary and grammar of Guianese French Creole, though these are long-term projects to be completed after the dissertation. The goal, however, is to create the first complete grammar and dictionary based on the available written data as well as spoken data collected during fieldwork. In addition, I have presented recently on topics such as sociolinguistic variation in Northern Haitian Creole, vocabulary extraction in L2 French, the history of dictionaries of linguistics, and rates of borrowing in the Francophone gay press. In January 2014, I joined the faculty of the University of the West Indies-Cave Hill in Barbados, where I am Research Fellow in Lexicography and Director of the Centre for Caribbean Lexicography in the Department of Language, Linguistics and Literatures in English.
In my spare time, I have served as an officer in the Indiana University Linguistics Club, having been treasurer and colloquium coordinator. I have also served on the French & Italian Graduate Student Organization and as departmental representative to the university-wide Graduate & Professional Student Organization for each department I was in. I also enjoy singing, having grown up in the Trinity Church on the Green Choir of Men & Boys in New Haven. In Indiana, I have had the great fortune to belong to the Bloomington Chamber Singers, of which I was the Board President for the first half of the 2013-2014 season. I also enjoy life at home with my dog and cat.
Pictured above: A gate near Montabo Hill in Cayenne. Buildings on the Cayenne campus of the University of the Antilles-French Guiana.