Personal

My BA is from the University of Arizona, where I worked with Malcah Yaeger-Dror. My MA and PhD are from Stanford Univeristy, 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. You can read more about my academic journey at Why I became a linguist (from a page by Dr. Stephanie Shih), or listen to me talk about it on this episode of the Undersong podcast.

A random list of other things about me...

I'm an adoptive mother of two who is passionate about birth family preservation and adoptee rights.
I'm a 5th-generation Chinese American with ancestors who were born in San Francisco in the late 1800s.
I'm also 1/4 German (1/4 of which is actually Dutch) with family mostly in the Düsseldorf area.
Most of my family is from/in California. I was raised in snowy Flagstaff, Arizona.
I'm a clarinetist (especially contra-alto), a saxophonist (especially tenor).
Tha rud beag Gaidhlig agam agus tha mi ag ionnsachadh.

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"Without something to belong to, we have no stable self, and yet total commitment and attachment to any social unity implies a kind of selflessness. Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wider social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid building of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks." -- Erving Goffman 1961, Asylums, p.250