Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Linguistics
Georgetown University
2005

Master of Arts (M.A.)

English Language and Literature
University of North Dakota
1999

Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)

Linguistics
Minsk Linguistic University
1988

Graduate Courses

ENGG 204a: Linguistics and Literature

ENGG 204b: Linguistics for Graduate Students of English

Undergraduate Courses

ENGL 002, ENGL 076: Composition

ENGL 110: Language/Linguistics Foundations

ENGL 114: College Grammar

ENGL 296/ENGL 092 Senior Thesis/Honors for Seniors

ENGL 26X: Topics in Linguistics: Language and Food

ENGL 26X: Topics in Linguistics: Discourse Analysis

ENGL 26X: Topics in Linguistics: Forensic Linguistics

ENGL 26X: Topics in Linguistics: Narrative Analysis

ENGL 26X: Topics in Linguistics: Social Media, Language, and Everyday Life

Howard University, President’s Medal of Achievement, May 2023

College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Service Award (Professor), 2022-2023

College of Arts and Sciences Dean's Award, 2021-2022

Identity and Ideology in Digital Food Discourse

Identity and Ideology in Digital Food Discourse: Social Media Interactions across Cultural Contexts

Exploring food-related interactions in various digital and cultural contexts, this book demonstrates how food as a discursive resource can be mobilized to accomplish actions of social, cultural, and political consequence. The chapters reveal how social media users employ language, images, and videos to construct identities and ideologies that both encompass and transcend food.

How to Write about the Media Today

How to Write about the Media Today

How to Write about the Media Today is the first book to offer students and media practitioners a comprehensive approach for researching and preparing a report, paper, or presentation on some aspect of today's mass communication. 

How to Write about the Media Today begins with a discussion of different types of media outlets—from traditional newspapers and television to the Internet—as well as an overview of contemporary directions in media studies. This is followed by a series of step-by-step strategies for selecting topics, conducting research, and writing cogently and engagingly about media-related events and issues. Because each chapter stands on its own, this resource can be read sequentially or consulted topic-by-topic as needed.

Self-Talk

Self-Talk: An Interdisciplinary Review and Transdisciplinary Model

The present work synthesises the self-talk literature and constructs a transdisciplinary self-talk model to guide future research across all academic disciplines that engage with self-talk. A comprehensive research review was conducted, including 559 self-talk articles published between 1978 and 2020. These articles were divided into 6 research categories: (a) inner dialogue, (b) mixed spontaneous and goal-directed organic self-talk, (c) goal-directed self-talk, (d) spontaneous self-talk, (e) educational self-talk interventions, and (f) strategic self-talk interventions. Following this, critical details were extracted from a subsample of 100 articles to create an interdisciplinary synthesis of the self-talk literature.

Performing friendship in a lab setting

Performing friendship in a lab setting: Advice in troubles talk between friends

This article demonstrates how lab-recorded interactions—viewed as performance—can lend valuable insights into how research participants display (normative) behaviors and identities. Specifically, using a multimethod approach, we analyze advice-giving in dyadic interactions between college-age friends who engage in troubles talk. Being supportive, including offering advice, is essential in friendships. This study, by identifying the various linguistic realizations of advice and explicating how friends manage the power/solidarity tension, adds to our understanding of the important activity of advice-giving in the context of friendship and illuminates friendship through the lens of advice. It also addresses the methodological question of how lab data fit into the landscape of sociolinguistic research.

Intertextuality in action

Intertextuality in action: The role of expert advice in everyday parenting

This article explores the relationship between discourse and action by examining the role of expert advice in everyday parenting practices. Drawing upon the notions of dialogicality (Bakhtin, 1981), intertextuality (Kristeva, 1986), and repetition (Tannen, 2007) and incorporating insights from Mediated Discourse Analysis (e. g., Scollon, 1998; Scollon and Scollon, 2007; Norris and Jones, 2005), this work analyzes instances in which the actions of parents in three American families can be traced back to various public texts on parenting. Such relationship between text and action is identified as intertextuality in action (Author, 2005, 2020), or when public texts serve as resources for the verbal and non-verbal everyday actions of parents.