I am a Germanic linguist, specializing in variationist sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and second language acquisition. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) and teach courses on Germanic languages and linguistics. Prior to Penn State, I worked as an Assistant Professor of English linguistics at the University of British Columbia as a specialist in the history of the English language. I received my Ph.D. in Linguistics from Purdue University. I am currently engaged in two long-term research projects. The first investigates intensification in Germanic languages (modern and historical), a project which involves an examination of how linguistic and social factors shape the use and development of intensifying adverbs. The second uses variationist sociolinguistic methods to examine the social conditioning of lexis and discourse in German and other Germanic languages. My doctoral work focused predominantly on applied historical linguistics, and examined how knowledge of language change can be beneficial when learning historically related languages.