I am a sociolinguist. I work primarily from variationist approaches. Most of my research has focused on describing varieties of English, and identifying changes in dialects resulting from a range of social and linguistic factors. My current projects include editing the Routledge Handbook of Sociophonetics; a series of "historical sociophonetic" projects to use old speech recordings to test hypotheses about sound change which were constructed to explain present-day data; exploration of sentiment analysis as a predictor of micro-syntactic variability; and several collaborations on English language and English language teaching in African contexts. Public engagement is important to my work, too. I am a Fellow in the Warwick Institute of Engagement, and frequently share knowledge about language and linguistics in media appearances, webinars, presentations, and other events. My engagement work also includes collaborations with Cockney Cultures to celebrate non-standard Englishes traditionally associated with East London and reduce language prejudice faced by speakers of these varieties, as well as collaborations across the Eutopia Alliance of universities to foster public engagement and impact through historical sociolinguistic research. I welcome inquiries from qualified students who wish to pursue PhD projects in sociophonetics, dialectology, and other areas of language variation and change. I am also happy to consider supervising undergraduate projects in these areas in connection with Warwick's Undergraduate Research Support Scheme.

I joined Warwick in 2017. I received my PhD in 2014 from the University of Missouri. I taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels in the United States from 2006 to 2017. I was also previously an officer in the United States Army.