Meet the Institute Team

Dr. Natalia Knoblock, Project co-director

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Dr. Natalia Knoblock has a Ph.D. in Linguistics and a Master’s degree in English as a Foreign Language. She is currently serving as co-editor of the Journal of Language and Discrimination, which provides scholars with an opportunity to discuss many forms of discrimination (in terms of language, ethnicity, gender, religion, political orientation, and others) affecting societies. She has been teaching sociolinguistic courses at SVSU, and she has conducted research in political and cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics, and corpus-assisted discourse analysis. Some of her publications focused on xenophobia and hostility in online communication as well as the cognitive processes involved in verbal aggression and propaganda. She edited the collected volume Language of Conflict: The Discourses of the Ukrainian Crisis (2020) and is currently finishing The Grammar of Hate: Morphosyntactic Features of Hateful, Aggressive, and Dehumanizing Discourse (forthcoming 2022). Her contribution to the practical aspects of the Institute will be informed by the years of service on the First-Year Writing committee at SVSU, which makes decisions related to course design, setting or revising course objectives, determines placement and evaluation criteria, plans and conducts professional development for faculty, and more. She has been a liaison between the English department and SVSU English Language Program and has served as an Interim First-Year Writing Coordinator, supervising 39 full-time and adjunct faculty who were teaching 54 sections of Composition I, running monthly professional development workshops, mentoring and conducting observations of newly-hired instructors, collecting data for program assessment, and budgeting. She has years of teaching experience on secondary and postsecondary levels, working with people of different ages, nationalities, and educational and social backgrounds, and she prides herself on her ability to connect to her students and colleagues.

Dr. Veronika Drake, Project co-director

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Phone: (989) 964-2633

Email: avdrake@svsu.edu

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Dr. Veronika Drake is an Associate Professor of English at SVSU who completed her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MA in English Linguistics at the University of Regensburg, Germany. She brings with her a wealth of teaching experience related to language, dialects, linguistic bias and discrimination. For instance, she has been teaching courses such as Engl 370: Language and Education, which prepares education majors to teach linguistically-diverse students. For a current project, she explores how experiential learning can be used in the college classroom to disrupt linguistic bias. She is also working on an English grammar textbook (with Trini Stickle, Western Kentucky University) that incorporates grammar rules of dialects such as Black English, Chicanx English, and Appalachian English. Her background in language and gender includes her PhD minor in Language and Gender, her MA thesis on language/gender in hip hop, as well as her experience teaching gender-related classes such as the introductory Gender Studies class GS 100 and an honors class on Language and Gender at SVSU. She has gained valuable insight during her work as a graduate research assistant at UW-Madison as a member of an interdisciplinary team working on the NIH-funded project Reducing Gender Bias in Academia, which resulted in the publication of a workshop manual. She has also mentored undergraduate students’ research projects related to gender. For example, one student’s honors thesis examined how linguistic structures perpetuate traditional gender stereotypes, while another student’s ongoing university-funded research project explores hate language that targets transgender individuals.

Dr. Colleen D'Arcy, K-12 Leader

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Dr. Colleen D'Arcy, Ph.D. is an experienced classroom teacher, administrator, teacher educator, and parent with degrees and certification in Early Childhood, Elementary Education, Literacy, Special Education, and Social Sciences. She has worked in local elementary schools as a K-6 Special Education teacher and as an administrator for Birth to Five programs. Additionally, she was an instructional coach for the New Teacher Support program SVSU conducted through the Title II Teacher Quality Enhancement grant. Colleen’s work as a faculty member in SVSU’s Teacher Education program has centered around resiliency in schools, teacher mentoring, parent/caregiver coaching, and supporting young children with special needs in general education classrooms. She is especially committed to seeing her teachers grow in their ability to reflect on their own professional practices through video reflection.

Dr. David Peterson, Guest Scholar

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Dr. David Peterson is an Associate Professor of English and the Associate Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He teaches courses in American literature and culture, and LGBTQ+ studies. He is a certified College Board Consultant, focusing on Advanced Placement Language and Composition. Since 2018, he has taught intensive workshop courses on analyzing hate speech for the Lavender Languages Institute at Florida Atlantic University. A pioneer of applying Critical Discourse Analysis and Hallidayan Functional Grammar to studying homophobic language use, his articles on homophobia has appeared in Gender and Language, Journal of Homosexuality, and the Journal of Language and Sexuality, and in edited collections such as The Grammar of Hate, Queering Paradigms and The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality. He is currently working on an edited collection that focuses on language and normativity.

Dr. Trini Stickle, Guest Scholar

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Dr. Trini Stickle is an Associate Professor of English at Western Kentucky University. As an applied linguist, her research interests are broadly focused on factors that negatively affect persons’ access to meaningful interaction within their communities. She focuses on individuals with dementia, individuals with autism, and individuals learning English as a second language to better understand the interaction barriers unique to each group and specific participant strategies to overcome these difficulties. Dr. Stickle is currently investigating the aging and health care experiences of immigrant and refugee populations living in the southern regions of the US. She is also developing trainings for K-12 teachers on embracing dialect diversity. She is the current section editor on Old Age for The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Critical Perspectives on Mental Health.

Dr. Megan Figueroa, Guest Scholar

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Dr. Megan Figueroa is a developmental psycholinguist and research scientist in the Department of Psychology at the University of Arizona. She is also the co-host of The Vocal Fries, a podcast about linguistic discrimination. She completed her PhD in Linguistics at the University of Arizona in 2018, where her doctoral work focused on children’s morphosyntactic development and overgeneralization of linguistic patterns. Her latest work addresses the cultural mismatch between research on children’s language development and the diverse realities of children’s language environments and linguistic repertoires. Her perspective is shaped by her own experience growing up in a working-class, Mexican American home. She recognized her family in deficit-based descriptions of language development in the literature, and she endeavors to broaden our collective understanding of language development by disrupting these inequitable and inaccurate descriptions.

Dr. Teaira McMurtry, Guest Scholar

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Teaira McMurtry, PhD, Assistant Professor at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, is a former high school English Language Arts teacher, literacy leader, and curriculum specialist for Milwaukee Public Schools. She was a 2018-20 fellow in the National Council for Teachers of English's (NCTE) Cultivating New Voices among Scholars of Color (CNV) program. She has published articles on the promising outcomes of centering Black Language in curriculum and pedagogy in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy and English Journal.