Sarah G. Thomason Collegiate Professor of Linguistics; Arthur F. Thurnau Professor; Professor of Linguistics, Germanic Languages and Literatures, and English Language and Literature; Chair, Communication and Media
she/her
About
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 variation and social cognition, sociolinguistic perception, and language change. She has published and taught about the ties between language and social identities, particularly queer identities. She has also worked extensively on language in the mass media. Her book, Vox Popular: The Surprising Life of Language in the Mass Media (Wiley, 2015) explores how language variation functions within the fictional mass media.
Professor Queen regularly teaches Language and Discrimination; Language in the Mass Media; Sociolinguistics; and Language, Gender and Sexuality. She has supervised a wide range of graduate dissertations focused on topics as varied as language change in African American speech communities in Detroit; Bai (China) language change and ideology, perceptions of Southern American English in the mass media, and an exemplar theoretic account of sociolinguistic perception. Graduate students she has advised have been successful on both the academic job market, with placements in tenure-track and research scientist positions both within and outside of the United States, and in a range of industry, creative, and higher education positions.
Among other governance assignments, she has been elected to the University Faculty Senate and apointed to the Advisory Boards of the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching; the College's Instructional Technology Committee; the Language Resource Center; the University Libraries and RISE (an ADVANCE unit focused on civility and respect in academic environments). She has served the Linguistics Department in a variety of capacities, including as Director of Graduate Studies, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Associate Department Chair and Department Chair. She was the co-chair of the Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics for the Linguistic Society of America and was the co-director (w/Andries Coetzee) of the 2013 Summer Institute in Linguistics. She has been an elected member of the Linguistic Society of America's Executive Committee. She served as the co-editor (w/Anne Curzan) of the Journal of English Linguistics from 2006-2012 and is on the editorial boards of multiple academic journals.
Affiliation(s)
- Linguistics
- Germanic Languages and Literatures
- English Language and Literature: Linguistic Anthropology (Program Affiliate)
Field(s) of Study
- Sociolinguistics, Language Contact, Language, Gender and Sexuality, Language Variation and the Mass Media, Language Ideology
