Graduate Students
Graduate Students
Abigail Amick
abalam@unc.edu
B.A. Linguistics and German, University of Texas at Austin, 2020.
Abigail is a second-year MA student. Her research interests are phonetics and phonology, particularly the interface between the two. Her current work involves prosodic borrowing in speech islands and the sound systems of Sgaw Karen.
Trey Anthony
Judah Bachmann
B.S. Linguistics, Florida State University, 2024
Judah is a first-year MA student. He is primarily interested in sociolinguistics and dialectology but hopes to explore applications of syntactic research as well.
Tré Carter
atcarter@unc.edu
Esther Chen
estherchen@unc.edu
B.A. Linguistics and German, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2023
Esther is a first-year M.A. student, whose primary interest is second language acquisition. She has previously examined if and how learners might be able to identify a “default” allomorph when learning the pluralization patterns in an artificial language.
Leah Dudley
Brent Eisenbarth
M.A. Linguistics. University of North Carolina. 2018.
B.A. Comparative Literature and Romance Languages: Hispanic Linguistics specialization. 2016.
Brent is a doctoral student in Hispanic Linguistics with an interest in Galician sociolinguistics and bilingualism. In his master’s thesis, he studied the role of vision in L2 phonological acquisition. After teaching in K – 12 education in both the United States and Spain, Brent has returned to UNC Linguistics to investigate how Galician speakers signal their regional and sociopolitical identities through grammar and lexicon.
Rebecca Galloway
A.B. Linguistics with minor in History. Barnard College of Columbia University, 2023.
Rebecca is a first-year MA student. She is interested in theoretical morphosyntax and semantics. She also has a passion for studying and documenting language varieties of the American South, particularly those that are endangered or dying. She especially enjoys research that bridges her theoretical and typological interests.
Samantha Golden
samanthagolden@unc.edu
B.A. Hispanic Linguistics, B.S. Business Administration, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2018
Samantha is a second year PhD student. Past research has focused on multilingual acquisition in children and the interpretation of emojis in text messages across English and Spanish. Her linguistics interests are focused on Hispanic Linguistics, specifically L2 acquisition for native English speakers, the intersection between cognitive science and linguistics, and pragmatics
Annika Herlant
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
Zhongyu (Alex) Hu
hzyalex@unc.edu
B.A Linguistics & Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong, 2024.
Zhongyu (Alex) is a first year M.A. student who is interested in exploring myths of human languages with the help of computational models.
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
kimdaisy@unc.edu
B.A. Linguistics, Computer Science, Emory University, 2022
Daisy is a second year M.A. student. Her linguistics interests are in sociolinguistics and computational linguistics.
Monica Lopez-Vasquez
As an MD graduate from Mexico, specializing in Audiology & Otoneurology, and holding a Master’s in Creative Writing, Mónica has now transitioned into the Hispanic Linguistics Ph.D. program. She initiated her graduate research in partnership with the UNAM Linguistic Engineering Group conducting a comprehensive study entitled “Emoji Usage in Mexican Spanish Corpus: A Multiple-Method Linguistic Approach”
Building on her analytic background, Mónica employed both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze a database on Heritage Language Learners. Drawing from her findings, she crafted a diagnostic tool aiming to unearth the motivations and requirements of heritage language learners across languages at UNC. This instrument is set to reach a broad audience, targeting both undergraduate and graduate students across various UNC campuses and beyond. The overarching ambition of this survey is to lay foundational insights for specialized course development.
Transitioning into another domain of expertise, Mónica has engaged in impactful projects at the Carolina Institute of Developmental Disabilities. She has been instrumental in localizing, formulating, and translating medical data, diagnostic resources, and tools tailored for the Hispanic community. Her pivotal role in the “Experiences of Spanish-Speaking Families with a Remote Neurodevelopmental Assessment” project is noteworthy. Presently, Mónica is channeling her energies into creating written and audio resources, including a podcast, aimed at assisting Hispanic families with potentially developmentally-challenged children.
In parallel, Mónica is also drafting a proposal focused on advanced instruction and Spanish certification tailored for Healthcare Providers.
Yiran Li
Lanna McRae
Ashton Rooney
Brandon Osgan
Elisei Stakovskii
B.A. Philology (Linguistics and Translation Studies), Higher School of Economics (Saint Petersburg, Russia), 2020
Elisei is a first-year MA student who is mostly interested in Corpus Linguistics, Computational Linguistics and NLP broadly. More specifically, his interests lie in applications of NLP to low-resource languages and the interpretability of LLMs from the standpoint of Linguistics. Before joining the MA in Linguistics at UNC Elisei since 2020 had been working in the Russian Tech companies as an NLP/Machine Learning engineer and has been actively contributing to the open-source community, in particular to HuggingFace and GitHub.
Yuhan Sui
Emma Wrenn
B.A. Linguistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2024
Emma is a first-year MA student with interests in phonetics and language documentation and revitalization. Her previous research focused on the sound system of the Santiago Azajo dialect of P’urhepecha.