IMPORTANT NOTE: My home department is Romance Languages, and I teach for them primarily in Spanish. If you cannot take a course in Spanish, you will most likely not be able to take coursework with me. That said, if you are interested in having me on your doctoral or master's committee, please contact me. 

I am originally from Las Vegas, Nevada. I completed my BA in Romance Languages (Spanish & French) at UNLV in 1997 and my MA in Hispanic Linguistics at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1999. I took a break from graduate studies from 2000-2005 and taught English in South Korea, working primarily at universities in Gwangju (Cheollanam-do). I returned to the US in 2005, when I started my PhD studies in Spanish Linguistics specializing in generative syntax at University of Iowa under the direction of Dr. Paula Kempchinsky. I graduated from Iowa in spring 2010 and started at UGA in fall 2010.

As a theoretical and experimental syntactician, I am interested in how language is represented in the mind, in particular, the syntax of subjects, clitics and left-peripheral elements and their interaction with information structure. I employ a variety of experimental methods based primarily on generative second language acquisition research in order to elicit quantitative psycholinguistic judgment data. My current research interests include the prosody of contrast and CLLD in Galician and Spanish, the L2 acquisition of word order variation in Spanish, and subject positions and information structure in Dominican Spanish. To see more about my research, visit my Romance Languages homepage.

I am a native speaker of English, and an Ln speaker of Spanish, French, Portuguese, Catalan, and Galician (acquired to varying degrees in that order). I also have knowledge of Korean, Latin, and German.