Robin Queen featured on The Best of Our Knowledge

As always, host Bob Barrett selects an Academic Minute to air during The Best of Our Knowledge.

Each week this program examines some of the issues unique to college campuses, looks at the latest research, and invites commentary from experts and administrators from all levels of education.

For this week‘s edition (#1339), Bob has selected Robin Queen’s segment. A professor of linguistics at the University of Michigan, Dr. Queen’s segment explores why certain people may be the grammar police and others not.

Robin Queen is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Professor of Linguistics, English Language and Literatures and Germanic Languages and Literatures. Her teaching and research center on sociolinguistic questions related to language contact, language ideology, and language change. She has also considered questions concerning the ties between language and social identities. Her work draws on data from a wide variety of sources, including Turkish-German bilinguals, American lesbians, daytime television dramas and American films dubbed into German.  She is currently working on a book-length manuscript about language variation in the mass media that is under contract for Wiley-Blackwell.

Professor Queen regularly teaches Language and Discrimination; Language in the Mass Media; Sociolinguistics and Language and Sexuality.  She has supervised a wide range of graduate dissertations focused on topics as varied as language change in African American

Co-Author Julie Boland

speech communities in Detroit; Bai (China) language change and ideology and an exemplar theoretic account of sociolinguistic perception.  Her students have been successful on the academic job market, with placements in tenure-track and research scientist positions both within and outside of the United States.

Among other service assignments, she has served the University on the Faculty Senate and on the Advisory Boards of the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching; the College on the Instructional Technology Committee and the Advisory Board of the Language Resource Center; and the Department in a variety of capacities, including as Director of Graduate Studies.  She was the co-chair of the Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics for the Linguistic Society of America and is the co-director (w/Andries Coetzee) of the 2013 Summer Institute in Linguistics.  She served as the co-editor of the Journal of English Linguistics from 2006-2012.

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