Assistant Professor of Language Sciences
College of Letters & Science | Department of Language Sciences
Hometown: Knoxville, Tennessee
Dr. Wright is a Black Biracial cisgender woman from Appalachia. She is an experimental sociolinguist researching the creation and maintenance of language ideologies over time and in real time. She is a scholar-activist conducting policy-driven research on linguistic barriers to access and discussing more covert constraints on individual self-expression weekly on WBAI radio. She is also an accomplished lexicographer, currently serving as lead editor of American Speech’s Among the New Words and working to document new terminology alongside words traditionally underrepresented in reference works.
Further areas of expertise: Profanity & Censorship;Automatic Speech Recognition;Historical Sociolinguistics;Linguistic Variation;Ethical Policy;Linguistic Justice;Local Ethnography;Media Studies;Archival Best Practices;Speech Perception