Catherine Stafford
Position title: Associate Professor, Dept of Spanish & Portugues, Language(s): Spanish
Email: cstafford@wisc.edu
Address:
Bilingualism, Identity, Spanish in the U.S.
Research Interests:
Cathy Stafford is an associate professor of Hispanic Linguistics and Applied Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her scholarly interests encompass various approaches to studying bilingual phenomena related to post-adolescent/adult SLA and the development and maintenance of Spanish in the U.S. in post-migration and Spanish-as-an-inherited-language (SIL) contexts. Pursuing longstanding curiosity about the workings of the mind/brain as people develop bilingualism, she was originally trained in linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to adult SLA, and she has researched and published on how cognition both influences and is influenced by language learning and use. Over the course of several years, Professor Stafford and a team of graduate students amassed a corpus of interviews and other language data from over 100 Spanish-English bilinguals from Wisconsin. In recent collaborative work using the corpus as a data source, she examines how bilingual people construct and negotiate identities in and through narrative; in this research she and graduate student collaborators train sociolinguistic and anthropological-linguistic lenses on social and interactional processes surrounding identity work in post-migration and SIL bilingual contexts.
Find out more about Catherine Stafford by viewing this faculty profile page.