I'm a 5th year doctoral student in the linguistics program at the University of Georgia in the lovely city of Athens. I have a pretty vast research agenda that includes work on Creole languages. I've spent a good deal of time researching various morpho-syntactic features of Papiamentu, a Creole language spoken on the Leeward Islands of the Netherlands Antilles, Curaçao and Bonaire, and on the island of Aruba, otherwise known as the ABC islands. In addition to Creoles, I'm also interested in anything having to do with variation in American English--from phonetic/phonological variation to syntactic variation to lexical variation--I'm curious about it all. My primary research interests in the field lie in corpus-based approaches to the study language variation. That way I get to combine my affinity for computers, and technology in general, with my interest in linguistic patterns of variation. I am currently conducting fieldwork in Atlanta for my dissertation research. The Atlanta research project is sponsored by an NSF grant.

I work for the Linguistic Atlas Projects where I'm in the process of creating a digital archive of American English based on data collected from the Gulf States atlas project or LAGS. Eventually, we hope to make all of the archived audio files available on the Atlas website. We're up to about 120 gigs of data, so when I can figure out a way to index and serve all of those streaming audio files without immobilizing our server and shutting down the campus network, you'll be able to listen to amazing voices and stories from folks in Mississippi (my home state), Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, and a handful of other southern states.

I teach an intro Linguistics course and a course in Information Technology here at UGA. And last but not least, I'm currently the webmaster and tech-support person for the Society for Pidgin and Creole Lingusitics and the Linguistics Program, respectively. But enough about me already....