Bio

As a former monolingual, I learned my first foreign language the hard way: through countless hours from the ages of 12-22, struggling to understand other people and be understood in return. I honestly never considered myself all that good at language learning. But halfway through my year abroad in Paris, something clicked. All the time I had put into learning French finally began paying off, and by the following winter break I had a reached a conversational level in Spanish, which I’d only started learning less than a year prior. So what happened? How was I able to learn a third language (L3) in a mere fraction of the time it took me to learn French? This question eventually led me to pursue doctoral studies in Spanish Linguistics at Georgetown University, where in 2024 I completed my dissertation on instructed L3 acquisition and its facilitating factors, with a special focus on metalinguistic awareness.

I am currently a visiting faculty member in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University at Albany, SUNY, where I teach language and linguistics classes in Spanish. Before my time at UAlbany, I worked for two years at Davidson College in North Carolina, where I developed a new upper-level course for Spanish-English bilinguals who are interested in learning L3 French. This hybrid French-language / Spanish-linguistics course was offered to 16 students during the Spring 2025 semester, and was designed with the intention of being replicated for other L3s, and at other universities.

Prior to my time in North Carolina, I spent three years teaching Spanish and linguistics at Emory University in Atlanta while working to finish my dissertation. Before that I was a Fulbright scholar at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, in Germany, where I researched the teaching of German as a second foreign language (Deutsch als Fremdsprache nach Englisch, or DaFnE). As a graduate student at Georgetown, I worked hard to promote the many L3 classes there, such as French for Spanish Speakers, which I created in 2016 and then taught for two years. I have published academic articles in the journal Hispania, as well as chapters in an edited volume by the UK-based Multilingual Matters and the German publisher Narr Francke Attempto (click here to view publications).

In pre-pandemic times, I enjoyed traveling to various national and international conferences, including the Second Language Research Forum (Montréal, 2018), the International Symposium on Bilingualism (Limerick, 2017), and the ACTFL Annual Convention and World Languages Expo (San Diego, 2015; Boston, 2016). Thankfully, this type of travel has once again become possible, with my most recent trips being to the Convegno Internazionale sulla riflessione e competenza metalinguistica nel processo di insegnamento e apprendimento delle lingue (Perugia, 2024) and the annual conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (Denver, 2025). On a personal level, I nourish passions for a great many things — music, animals, history, revolutionary nonviolence, Buddhist meditation, and tennis to name a few — and of course, I still love learning languages. In addition to those already mentioned, I have also spent time learning Portuguese, Italian, Hindi, Urdu, and most recently (and least proficiently) Danish.