Charlie with his dissertation committee, May 2019.

I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Tech. I am also a campus associate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Oregon. I received my PhD from the University of Oregon in June 2019. My research focuses on sociolinguistic variation and change on varieties of American English. In addition to my primary sociolinguistic work, I am interested in the preservation and access of audio recordings that can benefit future linguistic work.

My dissertation, “Language Variation and the Great Migration: Regionality and African American Language”, is a sociophonetic study of word final /d/ in AAL, focusing both on regional variation of the variable as well as change over time in urban AAL.

Over the past several years, I have been developing the Corpus of Regional African American Language with Tyler Kendall. CORAAL is the first public corpus of AAL, and is comprised of several components from different regional locales, including Washington, D.C., Princeville, NC, Rochester, NY, and Atlanta, GA. Using CORAAL, Shelby Arnson, Tyler Kendall and I are looking at vocalic change in Washington D.C. over the twentieth century. Additionally, I am working on two projects: word final stop weakening in AAL in Memphis, TN, Durham, NC and Washington, D.C., as well as word final fricative deletion in Southern AAL.

 For more information including recent papers and presentations, visit his site.