My research program overall seeks to understand language variation and change and the relationship to the historical socio-cultural contexts. Within this program I have generally focused on three main themes: 1. language variation and change with reference to changes is populations (e.g. large-scale population movements and regional variation/dialect emergence); 2. Methodological advancements for studying variation, specifically with regards to acoustic analysis of speech sound and voice quality; 3. Differences is subjective perceptions of varieties in English (as it relates to regional and ethnically variation), the potential bias that comes from these differences, and how that translates into observable differences in real-world contexts. While much of my previous work has been on varieties of English, I am currently involved in collaborative projects that investigate variation and change in two indigenous languages (Tlingit and ʔayʔaǰuθəm) and assess current methods of studying variation in these contexts as well as propose other methods that may be more appropriate for understanding variation in languages with limited data or which are not similar socio-culturally or structurally to the languages that have historically been the focus of variation and change research. Therefore, my research straddles the subfields of sociolinguistics, phonetics, phonology and dialectology.

I completed my PhD and MSc at the University of Edinburgh, where I explored dialect emergence in Liverpool and the population movements that have been suggested to be the cause of this dialect emergence. My undergraduate degree was completed at the University of Victoria.

Link to my Google Scholar Profile

You can check out my CV here (current as of May 2020)