About

Photo credit Melissa Cormier
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As the founding Director of the Center for Social Science Scholarship (CS3), UMBC’s sole comprehensive social science research center, I am proud to lead in supporting faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students across more than 20 departments and programs across in the College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences. Established in 2018, our broad ambition is to promote excellence in and to amplify the highly-ranked social sciences at UMBC. 
 
My interdisciplinary research, teaching, and engagement reflect my longstanding personal commitment to carry out and apply engaged academic work within a social justice framework. In brief, my work centers on three themes:  The centrality of language to social opportunities and social inequalities; Language in educational spheres; and Ethical principles and methodological innovation in the study of language.
 
In my work, I comprehensively examine language as a socially and culturally contextualized behavior and practice, and I work to dismantle deficit notions surrounding cultural and linguistic difference in ways that are community-centered while also informing educational policy and practice. I have received significant funding to support my research, including several active awards from the National Science Foundation across linguistics and language sciences, education, data science, and research administration.
 
I’m also an engaged colleague and a dedicated mentor in the LLC Program at UMBC. I have mentored over 45 PhD students to date, nearly all of whom are from historically and systemically underrepresented backgrounds in higher education and who also, in most cases, carrying out research that also aims to advance equity, inclusion, and justice in educational spaces. I am also active in shared governance on departmental, college, and university-wide levels as well as in national progressional organizations.
 
I am a past chair and a continuing member of the Ethics committee of the Linguistic Society of America, where I also serve on the Committee for Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics. I am also the former associate editor of the journal American Speech (2008-18), and I currently serve as an editorial board member of the Elements in Sociolinguistics series at Cambridge University Press and of Language and Linguistics Compass. I am also a member of two international university advisory boards: the International Academic Advisory Board of the Language Sciences Institute, a Global Research Excellence Institute at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and the Faculty Advisory Board of the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland.
 
Visit my research page for my CV and other professional information. Click here for my Google Scholar profile and my profile on Academia.edu. For more information, contact me at <mallinson AT umbc DOT edu>.