I am an Associate Professor of English and Linguistics at Wichita State University, Kansas where I direct the Menon Lab. I am also the Director of Linguistics at Wichita State, Director of The Center for Educational Technologies to Assist Refugee Learners and an Associate Editor of the Journal of South Asian Linguistics. I am the recipient of three University faculty awards at Wichita State University. In 2021, I was the recipient of the Young Faculty Risk Taker Award given to faculty who experiments outside the norm in teaching, research and service, and in 2023, I was the recipient of the Young Faculty Scholar award given to faculty who have records of excellence in teaching performance and substantial achievement in research. In 2024, I received the President’s Distinguished Service Award for providing exemplary, dedicated and caring service to the WSU community that is beyond the expectations of the duties and responsibilities of their position.The Center for Educational Technologies to Assist Refugee Learners’s Project Education for All was named United Way of the Plains Impact on the Plains Social Innovation Game Changer in Education in 2021.
My research is interdisciplinary and I collaborate with linguists, computer scientists, speech pathologists, education specialists, game designers, and psychologists. My research has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, United Way of the Plains, the State of Kansas, and the Dollar General Foundation. My current collaborative projects include Project Education for All, Cybersecurity for All, Building Bridges, beta testing Gorilla Bay, a bilingual digital game-based learning platform designed to teach English and Middle-School science to refugee children, Increase the Reach: Vaccine equity in the Guatemalan community in Kansas, and ASAL: Aphasia in South Asian Languages. My collaborators are Karissa Marble-Flint, JaeHwan Byun, Murtuza Jadliwala, Rachel Showstack, Nikki Keene Woods, and Arpita Bose.
My interest in theoretical linguistics is at the syntax-semantics interface. I work on a variety of empirical phenomena including, expression of degree modification, predication, and comparison, adjectival semantics and syntax, argument ellipsis, plurals and the mass/count distinction, notions of finiteness and case, and the phenomenon of closest conjunct agreement. My collaborators are Roumyana Pancheva, Andrew Simpson, Sarah Ouwayda, Arunima Chowdhury, and Alfredo Garcia Pardo. I am a member of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) and the Cognitive Science Society.
In addition to my theoretical work, I work on cognitive and musical processing, in particular, pursuing the relation between music and language through a series of psycholinguistic priming experiments. On this project, I collaborate with Elsi Kaiser. I am also interested in understanding where biases in parsing language (both natural and artificial) comes from, particularly relative clause attachment biases. On this project, I collaborate with Elsi Kaiser and Felix Hao Wang. I am also a member of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC) and Women in Cognitive Science (WiCS).
I am also interested in language documentation, language conservation, and revitalization. Along with photographer Hari Menon, I am documenting the endangered, moribund language Judeo-Malayalam spoken by about forty people in Cochin, India. Along with Hari, I am preparing a coffee table book, visually documenting the last remaining Jews of Cochin. Please check our website for more information. This project has been featured in the media recently: DNA India and the Deccan Chronicle. I am also working on making an online archive for indigenous food and language of the Potawatomi Indians of Kansas. In Fall 2023, I co-curated a public exhibition called “Where we belong: Refugee Stories from Wichita” along with Ksenya Gurshtein. This exhibition will be on display from August 24, 2023-December 07, 2023 at the Ulrich Museum of Art.
At Wichita State, I co-organize the Language and Linguistics Colloquium and lead the FoodLang Brown Bag Lunch Reading Group.
In an advisory role, I am the Linguistics advisor and company mentor of an early-stage startup called Subverses Inc. They are building a language learning game called Subverses Covert that helps you learn a new language through video games. I am also the advisor of TangoQA, a startup which is simplifying on-demand software testing.
To learn more about all this, please check the links above.
You can also find my fictional alter ego here and my culinary alter ego here and here and a blog with a friend on getting in and around California without a car here. I am the faculty advisor of the Wichita English department's blog and Wichita State's Linguistics Club.
My academic ancestors can be found here. My google scholar profile can be found here.
Media and News
I appeared on NPR’s 1A Remaking America’s panel on Sorting out Facts, Truth, and Opinion. You can watch the episode here.
United Way of the plains game changer award news article.
News article on NSF-Funded Cybersecurity for All.
News article on State of Kansas funded Project Education for All.
News article on Aphasia in South Asian Languages
COVID-19 pandemic interview with the Wichita Public Library- https://cdm17408.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/COVID-19_4/id/49/rec/13.
Perspectives: Reestablishing Reality talk can be found here.
A talk on interstellar communication can be found here.
[News]
Phenomenal woman award nomination: I was nominated for a phenomenal women award at Wichita State University.
Recruitment faculty fellow: I have been named a recruitment faculty fellow for 2021-2022 at Wichita State University.
[Upcoming talks/posters]
(2023) KU Linguistics Colloquy
University of Kansas, Lawrence, October 12, 2023
(2023) Improving cybersecurity practices and understanding of privacy among refugees (with Kaitlyn
Hemberger, Mohd Sabra, Murtuza Jadliwala) KSDE Great Ideas in Education Conference, October
25-27, 2023, Wichita, KS
(2023) Creating a Bilingual Digital Game-Based Learning Platform for Teaching Refugee Children Middle-
School Science (with JaeHwan Byun) 17th European Conference on Games Based Learning, 5-6
October 2023, Enschende, Netherlands
(2023) Being displaced, building a new home: What we can learn from the resilient refugee community
Public talk at the Ulrich Museum of Art, September 21, 2023
(2023) Creating a Bilingual Digital Game-Based Learning Platform for Teaching Refugee Children Middle-
School Science (with JaeHwan Byun) The Migration Conference, 23-26 August 2023, Hamburg,
Germany
(2023) Workshops for Improving Digital Literacy Skills Among Refugee Populations (with Kaitlyn
Hemberger, Mohd Sabra, Murtuza Jadliwala) The Migration Conference, 23-26 August 2023,
Hamburg, Germany
(2023) Modeling Red Tastes: Quality Color Adjectives in English Color-Taste Synesthetic Metaphors (with
Kaitlyn Hemberger), 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, July 26-29, 2023,
Sydney, Australia