I am Associate Professor in Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham. I was previously a Drapers’ Company Research Fellow and Director of Studies for Spanish & Portuguese at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge; Lumley Bye-Fellow in Linguistics at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge; and a College Lecturer at Exeter, Jesus and Trinity Colleges, University of Oxford. I have also taught Hispanic Linguistics at Queen Mary, University of London. I received my PhD from the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge, in 2017.

I am principal investigator of a British Academy/Leverhulme-funded documentation project on the grammar of Judeo-Spanish (2019-22); and co-ordinate the Linguistics in Schools Transatlantic Educational Network (LISTEN!) initiative (2018-), a network of educators working in schools and universities across Europe and the USA with an interest in developing Linguistics-oriented curricula and resources for primary/secondary (K-12) schools. I am also project lead for Spanish on the multi-institutional Linguistics in MFL project (2017-), whose goal is to introduce a Linguistics ‘content’ component in Modern Languages at Key Stage 5 (A levels) in UK schools;  and Co-I on the EUniWell-funded project Multilingualism for Social Inclusion in the European Classroom (2020-21), led by the University of Köln.

I specialize in the comparative morphosyntax, dialectology and history of Ibero-Romance. Much of my work to date has looked at how we “do things” with language. I am especially interested in combining data-driven approaches with conceptual insight from frameworks outside conventional disciplinary boundaries. My work is concerned both with testing the predictions and orthodoxies of theoretical linguistics as well as with challenging the ideological assumptions that underpin the public, policy and scholarly discourses that affect the social and material conditions of language users.