Michael Adams is Provost Professor of English Language and Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is author of Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon (OUP, 2003), Slang: The People's Poetry (OUP, 2009), In Praise of Profanity (OUP, 2016), and lots of articles, as well as editor of From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages (OUP, 2011), and editor, co-editor, or co-author of some other books. For a while, he was Editor of Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America and, for an even longer while, Editor of the quarterly journal American Speech.
Leslie Arnovick is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia where she teaches the history of the English language and other language studies. The author of Written Reliquaries and Diachronic Pragmatics, Arnovick specializes in medieval English, oral tradition, and historical pragmatics. Along with Laurel Brinton, she is the author of The English Language: A Linguistic History (3rd edition, Oxford University Press 2017).
Joan Beal is Emeritus Professor of English Language at the University of Sheffield and previously studied and taught at Newcastle University, both in the North of England. She has been teaching the history of English since 1974, and has developed courses on Late Modern English (1700-1900). She is the author of English in Modern Times 1700-1945, the first textbook dedicated to Late Modern English.
Rakesh Bhatt is a professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has published two books: Verb Movement and the Syntax of Kashmiri and World Englishes: The Study of New Linguistic Varieties (co-authored with R. Mesthrie). His forthcoming book is entitled Language in Diaspora, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press. He is famous for his works on Migration, Minorities, and Multilingualism, Language Contact and Code-switching, and Language Ideology, Planning, Maintenance and Shift. His work on Code-switching and Optimal Grammar of Bilingual Language Use (Co-authored with Agnes Bolonyai) offers a new perspective on the study of motivations for code-switching.
Allison Burkette is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Mississippi. Much of her work makes use of Linguistic Atlas Project data, for which she is the Associate Editor. Her research interests include language variation and its connection to cultural factors, which is the subject of her recent book, Language and Material Culture (John Benjamins, 2015).
Thomas Cable is the Jane Weinert Blumberg Chair Emeritus in English at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author and co-author of books and articles on the history of the English language and on prosody. Since 1978 he has been co-author of A History of the English Language, originally published by Albert C. Baugh in 1935; the current edition is the 6th (Pearson, 2013). He is also the author of A Companion to Baugh & Cable's History of the English Language, 4thed. (Pearson, 2013) as well as essays on the teaching of the history of the English language. His scholarship on the study of English poetry from its origins to the present is rooted in an analysis of the structures of language and their development through time. He has received prizes for his teaching and scholarship.
David Crystal is honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor and works from his home in Holyhead, North Wales, as a writer, lecturer, and broadcaster. His general books on the history of English include The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (2nd edition 2003), The Stories of English (2004), and Evolving English (2010). More focused works, which include teaching appendices, are Spell It Out: The Singular Story of English Spelling (2012) and Making a Point: The Pernickety Story of English Punctuation (2015).
Jonathan Davis-Secord (Associate Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, Ph.D. University of Notre Dame, 2008) is an Anglo-Saxonist specializing in the interactions of language and culture. His first book, Joinings: Compound Words in Old English Literature (Toronto University Press, 2016), explores the effect of compounds on style, pace, clarity, and genre in Anglo-Saxon vernacular literature. He has also published on Wulfstan's homilies, the Old English Boethius, the Latin sequences of Notker Balbulus and of the Winchester Troper, and the concept of race in La?amon's Brut. He regularly teaches HEL and courses on Old English and Medieval Latin, aiming to excite students with the beauty of ancient languages and literature.
David Denison is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at the University of Manchester and has held a number of visiting positions elsewhere. His research interests are mainly in historical syntax including current change, and recent work has dealt with word classes, gradience in syntax and problems of tagging. He has been involved in the construction or revision of several historical corpora of English. He was coeditor of the journal English Language and Linguistics for its first fourteen years, was the second president of ISLE (International Society for the Linguistics of English), and is one of the current coordinators of the ARCHER corpus project.
Michael R. Dressman is a Professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown, where he has served in various administrative positions, including Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences for fourteen years. His teaching and research fields include American literature before 1900, the study of the English language, and writing for special purposes. He has published on the poetry of Walt Whitman and English language pedagogy. He earned his bachelor's and master's degree at the University of Detroit-Mercy and earned his doctorate at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Natalie Gerber is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York at Fredonia, where she teaches a range of courses related to the structure, history, and use of the English language. Her essays on poets' and lyricists' artful uses and abuses of the resources of the English language appear in edited collections and in journals such as The Wallace Stevens Journal, where she is an associate editor.
Matthew Giancarlo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. He is author of books and articles on medieval English literature, history, and culture, and also on the history and historiography of English language philology.
Mary Hayes is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi, where she founded and now directs the Medieval Studies minor and graduate certificate. She is the sole author of the third edition of the late Celia M. Millward's classic text, A Biography of the English Language and its accompanying workbook. A medievalist by trade, her scholarship on medieval religious literature considers language in different way. Her first monograph, Divine Ventriloquism in Medieval English Literature: Power, Anxiety, and Subversion (Palgrave, 2011) explored how medieval people imagined mundane media's ability to communicate sacred mysteries. She is currently working on a book that explains the relevance of medieval Resurrection doctrine to literature's perceived ability to animate.
William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. (PhD, English, University of Chicago, 1980) is the Harry and Jane Willson Professor in Humanities at the University of Georgia, where he teaches in the English Department. His major publications include Language and Complex Systems (2015), The Linguistics of Speech (2009), the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English (with Clive Upton and Rafal Konopka, 2001); Introduction to Quantitative Analysis of Linguistic Survey Data (with Edgar Schneider, 1996); and the Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (with Virginia McDavid, Theodore Lerud, and Ellen Johnson, 1993). He serves as Editor for the Linguistic Atlas Project, the oldest and largest national research project to survey how people speak everyday English differently in different parts of America. He maintains an active community-language field site in Roswell, GA, and currently serves as UGA's institutional representative for the international Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Consortium.
Sonja Lanehart is Professor and Brackenridge Endowed Chair in Literature and the Humanities at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is author of Sista, Speak! Black Women Kinfolk Talk about Language and Literacy (2002) and Ebonics (expected 2017); editor of Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English (2001), African American Women's Language: Discourse, Education, and Identity (2009), and the Oxford Handbook of African American Language (2015); and former co-editor of Educational Researcher: Research News and Comment. She has organized and hosted several conferences on African American Language and African American Studies. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, African American Language, language and identity, Critical Race Theory, and Intersectionality in addition to the educational implications and applications of sociolinguistic research.
Seth Lerer is Distinguished Professor of Literature and Dean of Arts and Humanities Emeritus at the University of California at San Diego. He has also taught at Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, and Cornell, and he has been a visiting fellow at Oxford and Cambridge. He has published widely on the History of English and literary pedagogy. His book, Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language, appeared in a new expanded and corrected edition in 2015. His most recent book is Tradition: A Feeling for the Literary Past (Oxford University Press, 2016).
John McWhorter is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, teaching linguistics, Western Civilization and music history. He is a regular columnist on language matters and also race issues for Time and CNN, writes for the Wall Street Journal "Taste" page, and writes a regular column on language for the Atlantic, and his work also appears in the Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Aeon magazine, The American Interest, and other outlets. He was Contributing Editor at The New Republic from 2001 until 2014. He earned his PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 1993 and is the author of The Power of Babel, Doing Our Own Thing, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, The Language Hoax, and most recently Words on the Move and Talking Back, Talking Black. The Teaching Company has released four of his audiovisual lecture courses on linguistics. He spoke at the TED conference in 2013 and guest hosted the Lexicon Valley podcast at Slate during the summer of 2016. Beyond his work in linguistics, he is the author of Losing the Race and other books on race. He has appeared regularly on Bloggingheads.TV since 2006, and produces and plays piano for a group cabaret show, New Faces, at the Cornelia Street Cafe in New York City.
Rajend Mesthrie is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Cape Town, where he holds a National Research Foundation (NRF) chair in Migration, Language and Social Change. He is a past head of the Linguistics Section at UCT (1998-2009), a past President of the Linguistics Society of Southern Africa (2001-2009), and past co-editor of English Today. He is President of the upcoming International Congress of Linguists (Cape Town, 2018). Amongst his publications are Language in South Africa (ed., CUP 2002), World Englishes (with Rakesh Bhatt, CUP 2008) and A Dictionary of South African Indian English (UCT Press).
Haruko Momma has taught medieval English language and literature at New York University for twenty-four years. In the spring of 2017, she will take the position of Cameron Professor of Old English Language and Literature at the University of Toronto, where she will also serve as the Chief Editor of the Dictionary of Old English. She is the author of The Composition of Old English Poetry (1997) and From Philology to English Studies: Language and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (2012); and she co-edited, with Michael Matto, A Companion to the History of the English Language (2008). She has also co-edited special issues "The History of the English Language: Pedagogy and Research" and "Old English across the Curriculum: Contexts and Pedagogies" for Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (2007 and 2015), and "Old English Studies in the Nineteenth Century" for Poetica (2016).
Salikoko S. Mufwene is the Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and the College, and Professor on the Committee on Evolutionary Biology and on the Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, at the University of Chicago. He works in evolutionary linguistics, from an ecological perspective, focusing on the phylogenetic emergence of language and on language indigenization and speciation in colonial settings. His publications include The Ecology of Language Evolution (2001), Créoles, écologie sociale, évolution linguistique (2005), and Language Evolution: Contact, competition and change (2008). He is the founding editor of Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact.
Rob Penhallurick is the author of the textbooks Studying the English Language (Palgrave, 2003, 2010) and Studying Dialect (Palgrave, 2017). He edited the collection Debating Dialect: Essays on the Philosophy of Dialect Study (University of Wales Press, 2000), and has written two monographs on varieties of Welsh English. He has worked for the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects, the Survey of English Dialects, and the Atlas Linguarum Europae. He has held posts at the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield, and Tampere and is currently Reader in English Language at Swansea University.
Carol Percy is Professor of English at the University of Toronto (Canada). Her interdisciplinary work on eighteenth-century prescriptivism has focused especially on book reviewers, women teacher-grammarians, and the linguistic revisions to the journals of Captain James Cook. She has also co-edited Languages of Nation: Attitudes and Norms (2012) and Prescription and Tradition: Language Norms across Time and Space (forthcoming) for Multilingual Matters.
Tim Pulju is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and Classics at Dartmouth College. His interests include Indo-European historical and comparative linguistics, functional approaches to grammar, and the history of linguistics.
Benjamin A. Saltzman is Weisman Postdoctoral Instructor of Medieval British Literature at Caltech and will be Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago, starting Fall 2017. He is finishing a book entitled Bonds of Secrecy: The Cultural and Literary Mechanics of Concealment in Early Medieval England and is the recipient of several teaching awards from UC Berkeley and Caltech.
Philip Seargeant is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Applied Linguistics and English Language, The Open University. He is author of The Idea of English in Japan (2009, Multilingual Matters), Exploring World Englishes (2012, Routledge), and From Language to Creative Writing (with Bill Greenwell, 2013, Bloomsbury), and editor of English in Japan in the Era of Globalization (2011, Palgrave Macmillan), English in the World: History, Diversity, Change (with Joan Swann, 2012, Routledge), and Futures for English Studies (with Ann Hewings and Lynda Prescott, 2016, Palgrave Macmillan).
Matthew Sergi is an Assistant Professor of English, specializing in Early English Drama. In 2011, he got his Ph.D. in English and Medieval Studies from the University of California-Berkeley, where his dissertation work and publications on the biblical plays of the Chester cycle earned him numerous honours, including the Medieval Academy of America's Schallek Award and the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society's Palmer Award. Before coming to the U of T, he spent two years as an Assistant Professor of English at Wellesley College, where he continued his research on the Chester plays, which will take its final shape as his first book -- Play Texts and Public Practice in the Chester Cycle, c.1421-1607. The book investigates how the unscripted festive practices of Chester's citizens shaped, and were shaped by, the dramatic scripts they left behind.
Graeme Trousdale is a Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.
Jukka Tyrkkö is Visiting Professor of English at Linnaeus University and Docent (Adjunct Professor) of English philology at the University of Helsinki. A graduate of the University of Helsinki and a long-time member of its VARIENG research unit, his main areas of interest include historical linguistics with particular reference to lexis and phraseology, corpus linguistic methodology and digital humanities, and history of the book. He has been a member of several corpus compilation projects, including the Early Modern English Medical Texts corpus and the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts 3. He has taught numerous courses at several universities over the course of more than ten years, frequently using corpus linguistic methods in his teaching.
