I'm a Reader in Linguistics and English Language, in the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences,  at the University of Edinburgh.

​As a sociophonetician, I study the social aspects of phonetic variation. My research focuses differences in speech among speakers of different social backgrounds and in different social contexts. I'm interested in the factors that affect how speech changes over time. I'm also interested in variation as a social signal and the impact of accent on speakers' credibility and economic success.
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My BA is from the University of Arizona, where I worked with Malcah Yaeger-Dror. My MA and PhD are from Stanford, where I worked with Penelope Eckert and John Rickford. Before coming to Edinburgh in 2010, I was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Oxford, working with Deborah Cameron and Rosalind Temple.