Matt Gordon

Professor and Chair

Department of Linguistics

Jaime Pérez González

My name is Jaime Pérez González. I am originally from Mexico. I am half Mayan and half Hispanic. I grew up bilingual, speaking Spanish and Tseltal. I started linguistics working on Tseltal, which is one of the native Mayan languages. And then I moved to another Mayan language called Mocho’ for my Ph.D. I am continuing the work on that language currently.

The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America:  A Comprehensive Guide. 2023, vol. 1. Carmen Dagostino, Marianne Mithun, & Keren Rice (eds.). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 715 pp.

The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America:  A Comprehensive Guide. 2024, vol. 2. Carmen Dagostino,  Marianne

Mithun, & Keren Rice (eds.). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 1702 pp.

In all, over 80 authors are represented, a number of them members of North American Indigenous communities themselves. 

I’m a sociocultural linguist who specializes in the role of language in racial and gender identities, especially among youth in California. I also do research on issues of institutional discourse, representation, and power, including educational, legal, and media contexts.

My most recent book-length publications are the two companion volumes Decolonizing Linguistics and Inclusion in Linguistics, which were both published by Oxford University Press in 2024.

Julia Tomasulo

My name is Julie Tomasulo. I am originally from San Diego, California. I graduated from UC Santa Barbara officially in December of 2021. I studied linguistics with an emphasis in speech language hearing sciences; which is speech language sciences and disorders. I minored in teaching English as a second language.

Cynthia Sierra

My name is Cynthia Sierra and I majored in Ling LC&S and minored in TESOL. I graduated in 2021. I’ve taught in South Korea under the EPIK program and currently work at a library promoting literacy in children. I hope to continue pursuing work in Linguistics–I would love to try it all! 

I am Chloe Willis. My academic career began at UC Santa Cruz, where I got my bachelor’s in language studies, which was a program in the linguistics department. I had an emphasis in Japanese. After finishing my undergraduate degree, I lived in Japan for a few years and taught English as a second language. Then I moved back to the United States in 2017 to begin my graduate studies 

at UC Santa Barbara in the linguistics department. I got my masters and finished my Ph.D. in 2023. Now, I work as a research associate for the California Department of Justices in the research services branch. 

Karen Tsai finished her Ph.D. in linguistics in January 2023 at UC Santa Barbara. Her background was made up mostly of phonetics and phonology in Japanese linguistics. She now currently works at Amazon as a language data researcher; specifically, as a data analyst for Alexa data on Fire TV. So things people say to Alexa on Fire TV come straight her way.

Simon Todd

I'm originally from Aotearoa New Zealand, where my family has deep roots in the bottom part of the country through our Māori (Indigenous) heritage; we are members of the Ngāi Tahu iwi (tribe). I grew up in Ōtautahi Christchurch, where I studied applied math, linguistics, and French at the University of Canterbury.

I moved to the U.S. to start my Ph.D. in linguistics at Stanford University in 2013. In 2020, I started at UC Santa Barbara, but I spent that entire first year teaching remotely from New Zealand due to the COVID-19 pandemic; I finally arrived on campus for the first time in Fall 2021.

Aris Merchant

Tonatiuh Meza

Maria Moreno

Jaelyn Negranza

Phoenix Neuscheler

Brooke Nielson

Grace Niu

Lauren O’Friel

Brenda Ortega

Ireland Page

Alice Park

Joseph Patrick

Isabella Phillips

Nick Pirotto

Jiani Qu

Ameena Qureshi

Alexis Ramos Figueroa

Nana Richter

Bella Santos

Chris Saucedo

Jaden See

Miranda Solis

Diana Tagliaferro

Kohei Tanaka

Violet Tejeda

Austin Thatcher

Elizabeth Thorell

Elicia Valenciano

Sydney Vargas

Mariana Venegas Plascencia

Marilyn Villalpando-Ortega

Abby Welch

Brooke Winingham

Lily Wu

Han Yang

Katie Yarbrough

Brandon Yi

Alicia Yu

Nancy Zamora

Yessica Zavala Perez

Zoe Zeelander

Patrick Zhang

Tony Zhang

Wentao Zheng

Hanna Ziccardi

Joshua Mejia-Padilla

Guillem Belmar Viernes

Chadi Ben Youssef

Jordan Douglas

Simon Peters

Adrienne Tsikewa

Albert Ventayol-Boada