Robin Queen

Robin Queen is Sarah G. Thomason Collegiate Professor of Linguistics; Arthur F. Thurnau Professor; and Professor of Linguistics, English Language and Literatures and Germanic Languages and Literatures. Her teaching and research center on questions related to language contact, language variation and social cognition, sociolinguistic perception, and language change. She has published about the ties between language and social identities, particularly queer identities. She has also worked extensively on language in the mass media. Her book, Vox Popular: The Surprising Life of Language in the Mass Media (Wiley, 2015) explores how language variation functions within the fictional mass media.

Professor Queen regularly teaches Language and Discrimination; Language in the Mass Media; Sociolinguistics; and Language, Gender and Sexuality. She has supervised a wide range of graduate dissertations focused on topics as varied as language change in African American speech communities in Detroit; Bai (China) language change and ideology, perceptions of Southern American English in the mass media, and an exemplar theoretic account of sociolinguistic perception. Graduate students she has advised have been successful on both the academic job market, with placements in tenure-track and research scientist positions both within and outside of the United States, and in a range of industry, creative, and higher education positions.