Dr. Jill Beckman is the Director of the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, as well as the DEO and Associate Professor of German.

Sarah Fagan’s research and teaching interests include Germanic linguistics, theoretical linguistics, and the German language.

Marcin Dadan is a syntactician with interest in comparative historical syntax, especially morpho-syntactic and semantic change and variation, but also generative typology, fieldwork, and language acquisition.

Olivia Dunn is a Linguistics MA student. Her academic focus is teaching English as a second language (TESL), and she is particularly interested in the intersection of multilingualism and identity in the classroom. Additionally, Olivia teaches a section of RHET 1030 for first-year undergraduate students.

Meredith Mahy Gall is the academic advisor for the Division of World Literatures, Languages, and Cultures (including all world languages, International Studies, linguistics, and translation) In addition, Meredith advises social work interest students and global health studies students.

Becky Gonzalez is a linguist specializing in multilingual language acquisition. She works in the area of syntax, with a focus on argument structure, and is especially interested in the factors (linguistic and non-linguistic) that influence linguistic outcomes in different types of multilinguals. Her research combines theoretical and experimental approaches and she works predominantly with speakers of Spanish, Portuguese, and English.

Emilie Maurel-Destruel's primary research explores the semantic and pragmatic underpinnings of sentence structure variation and how the principles that govern this variation are manifested in French, but also across languages. Emilie also has research interests in second language acquisition and bilingualism, studying the acquisition of pragmatic inferences and sentence structure variation in L2 learners and bilinguals.

Bob McMurray studies speech perception, word recognition, word learning and neuroscience in children, adults, and impaired populations using linguistic analysis, eye-tracking, neuroscience techniques and computational models.

Melissa Meisterheim is the Director of English as a Second Language Programs as well as an Associate Professor of Instruction. Her interests include second language acquisition of vocabulary as well as curriculum design.

Mercedes Niño-Murcia, Professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Iowa, is a sociocultural linguist. Her work focuses on the consequences of linguistic contact and nationalist language ideologies upon bilingual communities in Latin America and the United States. She has done research on inequalities of language policy and how sociolinguistic inequalities affect indigenous and/or immigrant groups in both rural and urban settings.  She has also written about vernacular literacies. Her current research contributes to forensic linguistics (the study of interactions between language and legal institutions) and focuses especially on contexts that shape class and race hierarchies around Latino immigrants in the USA.

Christine Shea is interested in how age, experience and the native language sound system interact with the perception and production of a second language. Adult second language learners approach their second language with a first language already in place. She investigates how experience with a previously acquired language affects the way learners perceive and produce a second (or third) language.