Fuad Alghamdi

Hana Baalousha

Jessica Beck

Noah Brandon

Noah Brandon is a M.A. student specializing in Germanic linguistics and sociolinguistics. His interests include grammatical gender, social gender discourses, and language & sexuality. Prior to starting his M.A., he earned his B.A. in German here at the University of South Carolina.

Scott Brewer

Scott Brewer is a Ph.D. student in historical linguistics, phonology, and dialectology. His current work focuses on consonant shifts in Germanic and their exponents in dialects of British English

Hannah Cambre

Hannah Cambre is a M.A. student focusing on Second Language Acquisition and Teaching English as a Second Language. She is interested in developing pedagogical approaches to using CALL to differentiate learning in ESL classrooms. She earned her B.A. in Asian Studies from Furman University and taught English to immigrants and refugees in the Greenville community. She works as a communications specialist in the Office of the Provost.

Ruhan Čoban

Ruhan Čoban is a first year MA student in the linguistics program. She is interested in Psycholinguistics. She has a B.A. in Translation and Interpretation between English and Turkish languages from Beykent University, Turkey.

Samanè Eksir

I am particularly interested in topics like Second Language Acquisition (SLA), Natural Language Processing (NLP), bilingualism, and multilingualism. My previous research has largely centered on the intersection of computer science and linguistics in interdisciplinary fields.

Kayleigh Fisher

Kayleigh Fisher is a PhD student specializing in sociolinguistics, with a secondary field in pragmatics. Her research interests include offensive language and reappropriation, language and media, and humor. Before coming to UofSC, Kayleigh earned her MA in Linguistics and TESL from Indiana State University.

Elena Galkina

Elena is a Ph.D. student focusing on Second Language Acquisition and Phonetics and Phonology of Bilingualism. She uses acoustic phonetics methodology to examine how speakers of different languages acquire the sound systems of their second languages.

Shannon Gallion

Shannon Gallion is a MA/PhD student specializing in sociolinguistics with a secondary interest in pragmatics. Their research interests focus on the relationship between language and gender, specifically regarding language used in trans, nonbinary and gender nonconforming communities in English and romance languages.

Altyn Hallayeva

Altyn Hallayeva is a Ph.D. student studying sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Her current research interests lie in the cross-section of bi- or multilingualism, educational mobility, and the formation and navigation of belonging of bi- or multilingual migrants. Altyn's MA studies motivated her research in language ideologies, neoliberalism, and language policy in South Korea. She has a Specialist degree (B.A. equivalent)  in Spanish and an M.A. in TESOL (Teaching English to the Speakers of Other Languages).

Michael Highlander

Michael's primary research interest is comparative Germanic linguistics with a focus on historical phonology, morphology and morpho-phonology, incorporating dialectal evidence. He has done work in the grouping of Germanic languages using phonological and morphological isoglosses. His dissertation is on the development of diphthongs in Bavarian German dialects . He is minoring in German Literature, and is interested in Medieval and 18th and 19th German Literature.

Yuxin Jiang

Yuxin Jiang is a PhD student studying sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Her research interests cover (im)politeness, humor, power negotiation, identity construction and language ideology, particularly within digital spaces.  Her MA thesis examined the impoliteness strategies in Chinese online comments during the pandemic. Yuxin earned her MA from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and her BA from Lanzhou University.

Paige Kuester

Paige Kuester is a Ph.D. candidate with focusing on sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. She’s interested in the ways that language and food (specifically wine!) intersect with different aspects of identity, such as class, and the ways in which processes like authentication are used to sell consumable products as commodities with value. She received her BA from the University of South Carolina in English and Anthropology and her MLIS from the University of Illinois.

Price L. Lassahn-Worrell

Price is a Ph.D. candidate focusing in historical linguistics with a secondary specialization in medieval studies. His current research is focused on the syntax/semantics interface in medieval-era Germanic languages. He also dabbles in dialect additive approaches to teaching English. He holds a M.A. in English from Idaho State University. Outside of academia, he enjoys acting, philanthropy, and renovating his house. He is also the Middle-Aged Medievalist.

Samantha  A. Martin

Samantha Martin is a PhD Candidate in the Linguistics Program at UofSC. Her research in linguistic anthropology focuses on the circulation of feminist discourses in Chile.

Sara Moody

Anyssa  "AJ" Murphy

Anyssa (AJ) Murphy is a PhD candidate in the Linguistics Program, specializing in historical linguistics, Old English, Germanic, and the syntax-semantics interface. She has also studied Classical Latin and Classical Greek (about which she has published in the Journal of Greek Linguistics). She received her BA in English Literature and Classical Studies at Marshall University (Huntington, WV) in 2016 and her MA in Linguistics at the University of South Carolina in 2020. She is currently working on her dissertation, Exploring the Old English Passive: A statistical, Germanic approach wherein she applies corpus-based statistical methods to the question of the development of the passive construction in English.

During her Graduate studies, AJ has worked with Dr. Kurt Goblirsch, researching the Germanic vowel shift, and with Drs. Stanley Dubinsky and Michael Gavin for the Language Conflict Project, building a Language Distance Measure for comparing and calculating the linguistic distance between languages and language varieties. She has taught First Year English, Introduction to Language, Introduction to Language Sciences, and the Development of the English Language. For her teaching, she was awarded the Two Thumbs Up Award by UofSC’s Student Disability Resource Center in 2022.

Murphy, AJ, Stanley Dubinsky, Michael Gavin, and Harvey Starr. Conflicts over language stretch far beyond Russia and Ukraine. The Conversation: Politics and Society. May 23, 2022. 4 pp.

Murphy, AJ, Stanley Dubinsky, and Mark Beck. Semantic and syntactic demarcations of Classical Greek object cases: An object(ive) study. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 5.1. New Orleans, LA: 107-117. 00, Intro to Language Sciences.

Chandler Nichols

Olivia Paglia

Dawson Petersen

Dawson Petersen is a PhD candidate in the Linguistics Program specializing in Psycholinguistics. His dissertation entitled “The Effects of Anthropomorphic Linguistic Framing on the Online Sentence Processing of Texts about AI” uses an eye-tracking methodology to investigate how reading anthropomorphic language about AI (e.g., the AI wanted to…) affects how people think about AI. He earned an interdisciplinary BS in Psychology and Linguistics from North Greenville University and an MA in Linguistics from the University of South Carolina. His research interests include anthropomorphism, metaphor, relevance theory, and ad hoc cognition. https://dawson-petersen.github.io/

Paige  (Victoria) Pinkston

Paige Pinkston is a Ph.D. student studying sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. She is interested in language and identity, race, politics, law, media, and the U.S. South. She is currently looking at youth political speech. She has a B.A. in Literature and an M.A. in Second Language Acquisition.

Angelina Rubina

Angelina Rubina is a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics (graduating in Spring 2025) at the University of South Carolina, where she also earned an M.A. in Comparative Literature (Russian and English) and a Certificate in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL). Her professional interests in linguistics stem from her experience as a language educator and aim to bridge the gap between second and heritage language acquisition, theoretical linguistics, and classroom-based language instruction. Her literary research interests are related to the Russian literature of the Soviet period, with the focus on different psychological interpretations of Soviet literature, especially the psychology of resistance and non-resistance.

For a more detailed description of Angelina’s research and teaching experience, go to www.angelinarubina.com.

Amenah Salman

Nadra Salman

Shana Scucchi

Shana is a PhD candidate specializing in Second Language Acquisition of Sociopragmatics. Her current research focuses on the intersection of (Im)Politeness, L2 Identity and Agency, and how Task-Based Language Teaching impacts the acquisition of different aspects of L2 sociopragmatics.

Rok Sim

Bio coming!

Kalil Warren

Sarah Wilson

Sarah C. Wilson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Linguistics Program, specializing in Psycholinguistics. She received her B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2018), and her M.A. in Linguistics from the University of South Carolina, Columbia (2022). Her research focuses on linguistic alignment and priming in dialogue, the effects of aging on language production, and the neural basis of language. Sarah is a graduate research assistant on the Aging Brain Cohort (ABC) in the Aphasia Lab.

Cheng Xiao

Cheng Xiao is a PhD candidate specializing in psycho/neuro-linguistics and second language acquisition. Her research focuses on the processing of emotional prosody and semantics in native speakers and L2 learners. She has a BA in Humanities Science, a BEc in Finance, and an MA in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics from Wuhan University. Her personal website is available here.

Taravat Yazdani

Taravat Yazdani is a first-year PhD student in Linguistics (Fall 2024) with an interest in Experimental Pragmatics. She focuses on exploring what makes linguistic communication ambiguous at the semantics/pragmatics level and how certain cognitive functions/abilities, such as memory and reasoning, enable us to resolve these ambiguities. She finds the findings of psychologists and philosophers of language in these areas complementary and seeks to integrate insights from both fields into her research. Main themes and phenomena she is interested in include implicature, inference, contextualism, cooperation, relevance, silence, reasoning, and memory.