About Me

I am a fourth year graduate student of Linguistics in the Program in Language Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I completed my Master of Arts in Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2022 and my Master of Arts in Spanish Linguistics at The Pennsylvania State University in 2021. Before that, in 2019, I completed my Bachelor of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire with majors in Biology and Spanish and a minor in Interdisciplinary Linguistics. 

As a linguist, I am fascinated by almost anything related to language. However, my main research interests are related to the sounds and pronunciation of language (phonetics/phonology) and heritage languages: languages which are not the dominant language of society and are typically learned in the home. As a teacher, I hope to make others as excited about language as I am, but if that fails, I hope to at least leave them with some knowledge about language and linguistic diversity that they can carry with them for the rest of their lives.

I am originally from Little Chute in north-eastern Wisconsin. So I am a huge Green Bay Packers and Wisconsin Badger fan. I have mostly Dutch and German ancestry, and in recent years have been trying to reconnect with my heritage by learning the Dutch language and studying what remains of it in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin. In my free time, I enjoy drinking tea and curling up with a good book, going for a hike and enjoying nature, traveling, watching “nerdy” movies and TV-shows, playing Dungeons and Dragons, and spending time with friends and family. 

I also enjoy traveling to various places around the world for fun with my family and friends and to present at conferences. I studied abroad in the United Kingdom and in Costa Rica during my undergraduate studies and completed a FLAS (Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship) in the Netherlands and Belgium in the summer of 2022.