I am a Visiting Research Scholar at Fordham University.

I have a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). My research interests include sociolinguistics, phonetics, language variation and change, contact linguistics and bilingualism. 

My primary research centers on variation and change in contemporary Hasidic Yiddish spoken in New York, of which I am a native speaker. My current project investigates how the linguistic and social circumstances of postwar New York shaped Hasidic Yiddish. To do this, I draw on data from the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE), which is based on Holocaust testimonies; sociolinguistic interviews with New York Hasidim; online forums, and archival materials at the New York Public Library. I also work on prewar European Yiddish dialects, identifying previously undocumented patterns of variation.

This is an interactive website displaying some Hasidic Yiddish data (in progress).

Education

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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