As an M.A. student, I was granted two FLAS fellowships, one to study Quechua in Perú, and another to study Quichua in Ecuador. In Ecuador, I conducted sociolinguistic interviews and began building a corpus of spoken Quito Spanish. These training and research opportunities solidified my interest and desire to study Spanish varieties in contact with other languages, particularly English and Quechua. More specifically, I wanted to study varieties of Spanish that are minoritized, thus underlooked, along with their speakers.

My doctoral dissertation, Aspectual Differences in the Preterite and Imperfect in US Spanish: An Analysis of their Use by Three Generation English-Spanish Bilinguals in Arizona, aims to showcase the importance of a critical sociolinguistic and descriptive approach to studying the use of Spanish past forms (Preterite/Imperfect). Aside from analyzing what linguistic factors favor the use of one over the other, I am also interested in analyzing how it varies within the speech of members of three different generations. With this project, I hope to contribute to studies that analyze various linguistic characteristics of Spanish spoken in the U.S. My results also hold pedagogical implications, as I intend to use my findings as pedagogically based hypotheses to be used in research on heritage and mixed classrooms. My research plans have two main strands, sociolinguistic research and heritage language research and pedagogy. I have published in the Journal of Pragmatics, Spanish and Portuguese Review, Spanish in Context, and Languages.

I am very excited to offer courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels on sociolinguistics, heritage language research, bilingualism, among other topics. I am looking forward to providing courses that are engaging, yet challenging, within a classroom atmosphere that is nurturing and student and community centered. In addition, I am looking forward to the opportunities to mentor and collaborate with my colleagues and my students.

I am very much excited to start the fall semester with you all. Please do not hesitate to stop me in the halls or come to my office to chat. I am looking forward to meeting you all soon.

-Leslie