My name is Katherine, and I am a PhD candidate in the Linguistics Department at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. I also currently serve as Copy Editor for the open-access journal Language Documentation & Conservation. I study variation and change in minority languages. My work focuses on variationist sociolinguistics and language documentation, and I am particularly interested in the relationships between linguistic and social factors in small, multilingual speech communities. I am also interested in descriptive phonology of endangered languages and the typology of theoretically marginalized phenomena.

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My dissertation will examine sociophonetic variation in Ende, a Pahoturi River language spoken by the Ende tän in southern New Guinea. This research is made possible by the Ende Language Committee, the Ende Language Community of Limol, and collaboration with Kate Lindsey (Boston University) and Katie Drager (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa). I have also partnered with speakers of Serau Tet Kanowit, a Melanau language spoken in Sarawak, Malaysia, in doing language documentation and linguistic analysis.

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​My BA in Spanish is from Carleton College, where I explored late modern discussions of women’s role in revolution. Questions relating to language, gender, and power continue to inspire and inform my current work.