A life-long Midwesterner, Anna’s family only spoke English, but she was exposed to many other languages through a neighboring Ojibwe reservation and Greek, Polish, and Spanish classmates. During her middle-school Spanish courses, she became interested in the differences between English and Spanish, then the differences across all the languages, spoken anywhere in the world. This interest carried her to college at the University of Chicago, where she studied linguistics and anthropology.
As an undergraduate student, Anna explored the ways in which linguistics and anthropology can inform one another, leading her to Prof. Diane Brentari’s sign lab, annotating videos of emerging sign languages. She also began work on Ojibwe classifiers with then-graduate student (and current U-M Linguistics faculty member) Cherry Meyer. This experience compelled Anna to conduct her own research, drawing her to graduate programs in linguistics.
The University of Michigan ended up on her short list for a few reasons. Aside from knowing Dr. Meyer, who was a new faculty member at U-M, Anna’s undergraduate mentors also pointed her toward the program. It was important to Anna to continue exploring a breadth of topics in linguistics, so she was drawn to the diversity of research from the faculty and graduate students in the U-M linguistics department. Moreover, she loved the fact that U-M offers courses in Ojibwe and actively engages in research on Ojibwe and other language communities.
Anna’s research at U-M, advised by Dr. Barbra Meek and Dr. Pam Beddor, focuses on the relationship between speech perception, speech production, and social meaning in Dearborn English, a dialect spoken just outside of Ann Arbor. This dialect is a result of sustained contact between English and several varieties of Arabic, and Anna’s work examines how people use their sociolinguistic knowledge to understand the speech of others and make themselves understood in this sociolinguistic context. Her favorite part of this research is her engagement with the Dearborn community. While she just defended her dissertation prospectus this past semester, Anna says the conversations and connections she has made will last beyond her dissertation defense.
Outside of her research, Anna serves as Science Communications Fellow for the University of Michigan Natural History Museum. Here, she uses her skills in phonetics to teach visitors about the vocal tract at museum events. And outside of linguistics, Anna is an avid reader and writer! She’s usually juggling at least one print and one audiobook at a time, and writes for the Michigan Daily in her spare time.
