Dr. Robin Queen

Biography

Robin Queen is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan, where she holds the title of Sarah G. Thomason Collegiate Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor. With a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, completed in 1996, her academic work primarily explores sociolinguistic questions related to language contact, language variation, and social cognition. Queen has extensively published and taught on the ties between language and social identities, particularly queer identities, and has worked significantly with language in mass media. Her book, "Vox Popular: Surprising Life Language Mass Media," published by Wiley in 2015, delves into how language variation functions within fictional mass media. She teaches courses such as Language Discrimination, Language Mass Media, Sociolinguistics, and Language, Gender and Sexuality, and has supervised a wide range of graduate dissertations focusing on topics such as language change in African American speech communities in Detroit and language change ideologies in Southern American English. A dedicated faculty member, Queen has served on multiple governance assignments, including the University Faculty Senate and was co-editor of the Journal of English Linguistics from 2006 to 2012, and has held positions on various editorial boards of academic journals.

Research Interests