In late 2002, I was 17 years old. In the previous year, I had had a crush on a Russian girl - in my small town, she was something of a marvel, as one of the few to speak a different language. And what better way to attempt to get her to notice me than to secretly study her language? Well, it turns out that, if all you have is a Russian Grammar, without a teacher, linguistic training, or exposure to the language, learning Russian is extremely difficult. High School crushes come and pass, but my love of language never did; I started exploring other languages, briefly looking at Hmoob Njua, intrigued by the practical orthography and tone system.

Getting Here

But the study of particular languages never fully satisfied me, and I was left wanting more; I very nearly dropped language altogether for Quantum Physics. But all the while, I kept on studying; German and Spanish reminded me of English, and I began to think that, rather than studying languages, I could study Language, with all its complexity. In the end, I have to credit Google for leading me to the LINGUIST List and Eastern Michigan University. I immediately applied for an Undergraduate Degree in Linguistics, with a minor in Anthropology (though I nearly had enough credits to make it a major), and the summer before my Senior year, I joined the crew of LINGUIST.

Past Work & Current Interests

Before graduating with my BS in Linguistics, I worked with fellow LINGUIST Dan Parker in devising a series of language acquisition experiments focused on the resolution of VP-Ellipsis. Ultimately, I am interested in the intersection of sociocultural linguistics and cognitive science; humans are social by nature, and language is fundamental in that respect. More specifically and more recently, I have been focusing on the multitudinous ways that speakers use linguistic features as resources to forge novel (and mundane) identities, as well as how native speakers come to acquire a pragmatic system of non-core meaning (as well as knowledge of these social identities). Questions of this nature are necessarily interdisciplinary, spanning linguistics, sociology, psychology, and anthropology.

Extra-linguistically, I am also interested in sociocybernetics, consciousness, religion and trance cross-culturally (namely, conceptions of a non-physical substance, the notion of the "mind's eye", and attitudes towards ecstatic states), Tibetan Buddhism (both the shift from as well as modern relationships with the indigenous animism), ethnobotany, ethnomusicology, and my trusty Djembe.

On top of that, I've been known to play with a certain band called Mind the Wires.