Dr. Catherine Travis

Biography

Catherine Travis is a Professor of Modern European Languages at the Australian National University (ANU) and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. She holds a Bachelor of Asian Studies with First Class Honours in Linguistics and Japanese from ANU and a PhD in Linguistics from La Trobe University, awarded in 2002. Prior to joining ANU in 2012, she worked for ten years at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, USA. In addition to her academic qualifications, she is a NAATI certified translator for Spanish-English. Catherine's research interests focus on how linguistic and social factors influence language variation and change. She utilizes a variationist framework to study spontaneous spoken language within well-defined speech communities. Her primary research projects include examining regional Australian English through bushfire stories, the 'Sydney Speaks' project assessing variation in English spoken in Sydney's diverse migrant communities, and the Language Data Commons of Australia project to build digital infrastructure for humanities research. Catherine is also active in supervising research students and engages in various collaborative projects.

Research Interests