Open position: Post-doc in Linguistics and Education

We’re hiring! Come and work in the Sociolinguistics Lab under the direction of Dr. Betsy Sneller.

Position description

The successful applicant will join the MI Diaries project, which is collecting sociolinguistic data from Michiganders across the state. The position primarily will be in helping the MI Diaries project develop partnerships with middle and high school classrooms across the state, developing lesson plans for grades 5-10 based on MI Diaries data (in partnership with WGVU PBS Station), supporting project maintenance, and developing reports or manuscripts about community outreach in collaboration with the principal investigator (Betsy Sneller). We especially invite applicants with a record of success in both sociolinguistics and K-12 Education, as working with schools is a critical component of this position. There are no required teaching responsibilities for the position.

Important dates

Applications accepted from April 25, 2025 onwards. Review of applications will begin June 1, 2025. The position will remain open until filled.

More information

See the full position description at MSU Careers.

Continue ReadingOpen position: Post-doc in Linguistics and Education

Socio Lab students present at UURAF

Undergraduate members of the Sociolinguistics Lab and/or the MI Diaries project team demonstrated their research skills at MSU’s 2025 University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF) on April 11, 2025. Presenters included:

  • Sabrina Ruiz, Who’s afraid of the Big Bad C*nt? Changes in offensiveness across generations.
    • Senior thesis project supervised by Dr. Betsy Sneller.
  • Sara Kirkman, Emoji and age: Exploring age-based variations in expressing emotions via emojis
    • Senior thesis project supervised by Dr. Betsy Sneller.
  • Xhanna Travina, A/B testing for engaging users with Knowledge Commons newsletter emails
    • Mentor: Larissa Babak (College of Arts and Letters)
  • Hannah Choi, Interpreting the simple past as the present perfect (with Jaina Kittle, Kay Humpert, Mason Dellot)
  • Ezekiel Brown, Verb agreement with non-DP subjects

Continue ReadingSocio Lab students present at UURAF

MSU German Studies hires Rose Fisher

A photo of Rose Fisher smiling and standing in front of a table and a microphone.
Rose Fisher

We congratulate to the MSU German Studies program on their recent hire of Rose Fisher to a tenure track position starting August 2025. Rose Fisher is completing a PhD in Germanic Linguistics and Language Science at Pennsylvania State University under the direction of Michael T. Putnam. The focus of Rose’s doctoral work is morphophonological variation and change in Pennsylvania Dutch. As an L1 speaker of this minoritized German variety and a former member (until age 11) of an Old Order Amish community, Rose brings important sociocultural insights to her data collection and analysis. In addition to her work on inflectional morphology, she has published a general paper on Amish linguistic identity and was interviewed by the BBC about the Pennsylvania Dutch linguistic and cultural origins of Groundhog Day. She also has experience with dialect geography, having been a Visiting Junior Researcher at the Forschungszentrum Deutscher Sprachatlas (Research Center of the German Language Atlas) at the University of Marburg, Germany. The Sociolinguistics Lab looks forward to forging connections to Rose and her work in the years ahead!

Continue ReadingMSU German Studies hires Rose Fisher