About

I am Director of the Center for Social Science Scholarship, Professor of Language, Literacy, and Culture, and Affiliate Professor of Gender, Women’s + Sexuality Studies at UMBC. My CV provides a complete overview of my professional information, and click here for my Google Scholar profile and my profile on Academia.edu. For more information, contact me at mallinson@umbc.edu.

My research, teaching, and engagement reflect my longstanding personal commitment to carry out and apply academic work within a social justice framework. Via interdisciplinary and collaborative work, I comprehensively examine language as a socially and culturally embedded phenomenon. With a focus on language variation in the U.S., I work to dismantle deficit notions surrounding cultural and linguistic difference in ways that empower communities while informing policy.

I have co-authored two books with Dr. Anne H. Charity Hudley: Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools (2011, Teachers College Press Multicultural Education Series) and We Do Language: English Language Variation in the Secondary English Classroom (2014, Teachers College Press). I am also the co-editor of Data Collection in Sociolinguistics: Methods and Applications, a Routledge volume, 2nd edition, with Becky Childs, and Gerard Van Herk. I am also the co-editor of Rural Voices: Language, Identity, and Social Change across Place (2018), with Elizabeth Seale.

I currently chair the Ethics committee of the Linguistic Society of America and am a member of the Committee on Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics, I also serve on the editorial board of the journals Language & Linguistics Compass and Voice & Speech Review and was associate editor of the journal American Speech from 2008-2018. I obtained both a Ph.D. in Sociology & Anthropology and an M.A. in Linguistics from North Carolina State University, and a B.A. in Sociology and German from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Click here to download and read my linguistic autobiography!