Graduate Students
Cassidy Amundsen
Trey Anthony
Alex Austin-Trongo
alexcat@live.unc.edu
B.A., Spanish, Minor in French, University of North Carolina at Asheville, 2017
Alex is a third year M.A. student whose interests are mainly in historical and sociolinguistics, including language evolution, language interaction, and issues relating to LGBTQIA+ identity.
Sage Aviles
Cay Bappe
Cay Bappe is a second year M.A. student whose linguistic interests include Second Language Acquisition, World Englishes, and Phonetics/Phonology. She has previously collaborated on research projects investigating TESL topics, including observing English pronunciation of non-native learners and intelligibility ratings by native English speakers.
Jen Boehm, formerly Griffin
jengriff@email.unc.edu
B.A. Linguistics and Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2009
M.A. Linguistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2011
Jen is a Ph.D. student who is mainly interested in language documentation, dialect variation, and phonological models of variation. Her current research involves documenting the phonetic and phonological differences between the various dialects of Sgaw Karen that are spoken by the Karen community in Chapel Hill.
Victoria Brown
Lucas Adelino
Leah Dudley
Jana Gibim De Mattos
Samantha Golden
samanthagolden@unc.edu
B.A. Hispanic Linguistics, B.S. Business Administration, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2018
Samantha is a first year MA student. Her linguistics interests are focused on Hispanic Linguistics, specifically L2 acquisition for native English speakers, the intersection between cognitive science and linguistics, and pragmatics.
J Leo Hirsch
B.A. Political Science and Linguistics, Columbia University, 2018
Leo is a first year M.A. student. His linguistic interests are focused on sociolinguistics and language documentation, with specific focuses on heritage language speakers, Hellenic languages, and queer linguistics. His previous experience includes documentation work on Northern Zazaki with speakers in New York City.
Alyson Hignight
Xuan Hu
Victoria Johnston
brownv@live.unc.edu
B.A. Linguistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2017
Victoria is a third year M.A. student. Her research involves numeral systems in P’urhepecha and the description of Xianju Wu Chinese.
Daisy Kim
B.A. Linguistics, Minor in Computer Science, Emory University, 2022
Daisy is a first-year M.A. student. Her linguistic interests include sociolinguistics and computational linguistics. In her undergrad, she worked as a research assistant in a language acquisition lab at Emory University; she helped transcribe and encode Korean heritage speaker, native speaker, and second language learner data.
Andrew Knudsen
B.S. Biomedical Engineering, B.S. Mathematics, Minor in Linguistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2021
Andrew is a first year M.A. student. He is most interested in historical linguistics, epigraphy, and decipherment, but finds any area of linguistics fascinating. Through prior work, he has analyzed the effect of Spanish orthography on prosody and created a conlang with its own writing system.”
Emanuela Likskendaj
Mónica López-Vázquez
With a Medical Degree and a specialty in Audiology & Otoneurology, and a Master’s in Creative Writing, Mónica decided to start a new, nevertheless related academic path in Hispanic Linguistics. She is an experienced editor, and she is currently working on the translation and cultural adaptation of diagnostic tests for the Hispanic community. She is also working on the pragmatic and sociolinguistic analysis of emoji in a chat Corpus using Python.
Colin Nixon
B.A. Anthropology, Minors in Linguistics and Classical Studies, Purdue University, 2021
Colin is second-year MA student. Their fields interests are second language acquisition, phonetics, phonology, and the Slavic languag
Janani Ramadurai
Amy Reynolds
amyrey@email.unc.edu
B.A. Linguistics, Interdisciplinary, Minor in German, Hendrix College, 2009
M.A. Linguistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2011
Amy’s main interests include phonology, semantics, and the history of English. Her M.A. thesis was on acquisition models of English consonant clusters and she is now studying consonant-cluster reduction in a local refugee community.
Ashton Rooney
Jarem Saunders
Heejeong “Jamie” Wee
Heejeong’s main interests are Computational Linguistics and Language Acquisition. Since her prior experiences were mostly about syntax and morphology, they are the fields she is most comfortable with, but she is interested in all the subfields of linguistics. Through the master’s program, she’d like to learn how computers can be utilized to analyze language and how they can aid one’s language learning.
Rebecca Winters
wintersr@live.unc.edu
B.A. Criminal Justice Studies (cum laude), Minor in Psychology and concentration in Russian Studies, University of Dayton, 2014.
Rebecca’s main interests are historical linguistics, writing systems, phonetics and phonology, and modern electronic communication.