I'm a Reader in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh. As a sociophonetician, I study the social aspects of phonetic (speech) variation.

My research focuses on documenting and analyzing differences in vowel, consonant, and prosodic production among speakers of different social backgrounds and in different social contexts. I'm interested in the social signalling potential of variation, as well as its potential commodity value, and the impact of accent variation 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.