A new researcher Dr. Lisa Sullivan, currently a postdoc at the University of Manitoba, will be joining my lab this fall!  She will be supported by a Canadian fellowship for two years to work on a project about prevelar raising/merger (pronouncing words like bag and leg more like vague). The project would extend her dissertation work -- and my own "bag-beg-bagel" prevelar merger studies -- to map the phenomenon across North America, collect massive numbers of audio recordings and perceptions online, and provide public education about dialect differences and linguistic discrimination, all in one interactive website or app. Lisa has a background in web development and experience incorporating writing practice into curriculum development, as well as her degrees in linguistics. We'll be lucky to have her!

I had a good time at the Acoustical Society of America conference in Chicago. I participated in an invited panel with my co-author Sara Loss that Ben Munson organized about infusing social justice into acoustics pedagogy. We showed the sad null results we've gotten so far on our quest to find classroom interventions to help undergrads understand international instructors better (both in terms of intelligibility and attitudes). We got some good ideas for next steps, and we're not ready to give up yet (maybe we're measuring something different from what we're affecting). 

I taught a full-day minicourse/workshop at the Linguistic Society of America conference in Denver last week. A good group of grad students and faculty attended; we walked through various methods of remote sociophonetic data collection and discussed their really interesting project ideas. My co-author Sara Loss also gave a talk on our project about supporting better communication between undergrads and international students, TAs, and faculty. It was great to see so many old friends and colleagues, and the American Dialect Society Word of the Year was quite amusing this year!

This week, I was on an invited panel at the Center for Oklahoma Studies to showcase current work on dialectal features of Oklahoma English. I talked about pre-lateral mergers (phonetics), Sara Loss talked about personal datives (syntax), Nathan Horton talked about generational perceptions of "good" English in Oklahoma, and Sara's students Madalyn Peck and Maghin Brewer talked about the RODEO project and making available the data Dennis Preston's students collected during his years at OSU. It was held in the beautiful reading room in the library, and various faculty, students, and librarians attended and asked great questions. It was a great opportunity to present work to a wider audience and put our discrete studies in a broader context.