About me

I’m a Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at the University of York, in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science. My research lies at the intersection between variationist linguistics, sociophonetics, phonological theory and language change, with a particular interest in northern dialects of British English. I make use of a range of methods in my research, including techniques in articulatory phonetics such as ultrasound tongue imaging.

My doctoral research took place at the University of Manchester, where I was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. I submitted my thesis, ‘Variation and change in Northern English velar nasals: Production and perception’, in October of 2018. In this work I pursue a number of research questions regarding the synchronic and diachronic behaviour of /ŋg/ clusters in the North of England and how their variability is represented in speakers’ grammars, which speaks to a number of theoretical issues relating to pathways of sound change and the architecture of grammar. Since then, I’ve also been involved in projects investigating the acoustics and articulation of /s/-retraction, as well as mapping contemporary dialectal variation throughout the UK as part of the Our Dialects project.