About me.  I am a sociolinguist, which means that I am interested in how people use language in real life settings.  My research has been divided between work on African languages and talk in the automobile factories in the mid-Michigan area.  Recently, I have been working on language policy issues in Latvia and Lithuania.   At UM-Flint, I am currently serving on the Academic Standards Committee for  the College of Arts and Sciences.

I grew up in Portland, Oregon.  When I graduated from college, I joined the Peace Corps and taught English to elementary school students in Sierra Leone, West Africa for two years.  There I met and married my husband, another Peace Corps volunteer from Ohio.  We spent a year in Sweden and then went to the University of Illinois where I did a Master's Degree in Teaching English as a Second Language.  My husband's agricultural development work took us to Belize, the Philippines, Indonesia and Zimbabwe.  When he joined the faculty at Michigan State, I went back to graduate school in Linguistics and completed my Ph.D. in 1990.  I joined the UM-Flint faculty that year.  You can see pictures of my family by clicking on the Photo Gallery below.