I was born and raised in Boston, MA. I come from a big, loving African-American family and a thriving multilingual neighborhood (Mattapan). My love for linguistics was borne out of this early exposure to multiple languages and the multilingualism that surrounded me, growing up in the city. Outside of school, I like to dance, sing, rollerblade, and play with my two rabbits, Sugar and Peppercorn.
I graduated from Harvard in 2023 with a Bachelor's in linguistics (advised by Dr. Kathryn Davidson and Dr. Gennaro Chierchia). My senior thesis was on the distribution of tense-aspect markers in African American English (AAE), as spoken by the members of the "Black Harvard" community.
I am currently a second-year Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania, advised by Dr. Meredith Tamminga and Dr. Florian Schwarz. At the core of who I am as a researcher are community-informed and community-involved research; it is my goal for my research to be guided by the communities with which I interact and aim to impact. Without the communities that raised me and allow me to continue to study their speech, my research has no foundation.
My main subfields are sociolinguistics and semantics. My current work focuses on the intersection of race and persona and how the two factors influence pragmatic processing. I study how the psycho-social foundations of identity and pragmatic processing have real-world impacts on the lives of marginalized individuals and communities.
I am a member of the Language Variation and Cognition Lab (PI: Dr. Meredith Tamminga), the Penn Meaning Lab (PI(s): Dr. Florian Schwarz and Dr. Paloma Jeretic), the Language Contact and Cognition Lab (PI: Dr. Marlyse Baptista), and the Black Academic Development Lab (PI: Dr. Anne Charity Hudley). Navigate to their pages for more info!
Mikaela Belle Martin
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