Our members

Associate Professor Celeste Rodríguez Louro (Director)

Associate Professor Celeste Rodríguez Louro is Director of the Language Lab, Linguistics Discipline Chair, and Australian Research Council fellow in Linguistics at The University of Western Australia (UWA). She has recently been awarded a highly competitive Visiting Fellowship to spend Hilary Term 2026 at All Souls College, University of Oxford (14% success rate). Celeste is Deputy Chair of UWA's Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) Think Tank, Editorial Board Member for the Australian Journal of Linguistics, and area consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. From 2022 to 2024, she presented the award-winning radio show Language Lab, a Linguistics segment on RTRFM 92.1. In 2025, Celeste was awarded the 2025 outreach prize by the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) for her linguistics outreach. Celeste works with the Heart Foundation to decolonise the production of medical media for First Nations communities. She has also partnered with Google on a project which will ensure inclusive technology for First Nations people in Australia.

Trained in Argentina, the USA and Australia, Celeste’s research tracks language change across time. Her work deals with macro sociolinguistic issues including standard language ideologies, language contact, and multilingualism. Underpinned by the sociolinguistic principle of linguistic gratuity (‘giving back’), Celeste is interested in decolonisation and in ways to create sustainable work and planetary health. Her recent focus is on making technologies inclusive and equitable, underscoring the crucial role of humans in creating language models. Celeste’s publications have appeared in high-ranking international journals. Her work has featured in more than 100 peer-reviewed conferences, including multiple invited international plenaries and panels. She has won several research and teaching awards and has a strong media presence, a testament to her commitment to making Humanities and Social Science available to a wide audience.

Celeste is currently writing, in collaboration with Nyungar scholar Dr Glenys Collard, a monograph titled ‘Variation and change in Aboriginal English’ – contracted to Cambridge University Press. This work is funded through a highly competitive Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship (16% success rate).

 

Dr Glenys Collard

Dr Glenys Collard is a Nyungar scholar who has been working for and with the Nyungar people across WA for over 30 years. She is an Honorary Research Fellow in Linguistics at UWA and area consultant for The Oxford English Dictionary. Glenys has contributed extensively to understanding history, language and culture in Nyungar country and beyond. For her continued work in this space, she was inducted into the 2025 WA Women’s Hall of Fame. Glenys also received an Honorary Doctorate (Linguistics), which was conferred to her by UWA’s Chancellor in late July 2025.

Glenys was the first to record the Nyungar language with elders Mr Humphries and Mr Bennell and has chaired multiple state-level and national committees. She is a published author and has taught workshops to thousands of teachers and university students in WA. 
Glenys is currently working with Associate Professor Celeste Rodríguez Louro (UWA) on several projects examining change and identity in Aboriginal English. She has recently collaborated with the Heart Foundation to produce two original medical videos fully scripted in Aboriginal English. Glenys is also director, with Associate Professor Rodríguez Louro, of the Google-funded project titled ‘Aboriginal English Voices’, which seeks to make voice-operated technology inclusive for First Nations people in Australia.

 

Dr Luisa Miceli

Dr Luisa Miceli is Lecturer in Linguistics at The University of Western Australia (UWA). She trained in Archaeology and Linguistics at the Australian National University prior to moving to UWA for her PhD. Her research program involves three interrelated strands: language evolution/reconstruction of the linguistic past, language processing in bilinguals, and Australian Indigenous languages. Her research on bilingual processing provides novel insights on mechanisms of language change which then inform reconstructions of the linguistic past. These insights are particularly relevant in understanding the history of languages that have evolved in predominantly multilingual contexts, such as the Indigenous languages of Australia. Luisa has also maintained a connection with Archaeology and collaborates on some interdisciplinary projects.

Luisa teaches across a wide range of units in the Linguistics major and is also in charge of the Work Integrated Learning program, which gives Linguistics students the opportunity to gain valuable experience as professional linguists in different organisations, including community language centres, the WA Department of Education, and RTRFM radio. She has established a collaboration with Bundiyarra Irra Wangga Language Centre, jointly supervising Honours students working on community-led projects for their dissertation.

Luisa is a Member of the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) and a consultant for the Oxford English Dictionary, advising on etymologies that have origins in Australian Indigenous Languages.

  

Professor Clint Bracknell

Clint Bracknell is a Noongar song-maker, composer, and Professor of Music at The University of Western Australia (UWA).

He investigates connections between song, language, and landscapes while working on projects to improve Indigenous community access to cultural heritage collections.

Clint received the 2020 Barrett Award for Australian Studies and has co-translated world-first Indigenous language works in film and theatre. He serves as Deputy Chair of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) Council and maintains a significant creative research agenda, leading development of the Mayakeniny Noongar performance resource and releasing music under the name Maatakitj. He is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

 

 

Professor Umberto Ansaldo

Umberto Ansaldo is Professor of Linguistics and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Vin University, Hanoi. As a linguist, Umberto specializes in research on languages of Asia from a comparative and historical perspective. His publications advance an evolutionary framework of language contact that highlights the role of multilingualism and variation in language change. He has also worked in language documentation and researched endangered contact languages of the Indian Ocean. 

As an educator, Umberto has long promoted a student-centred, innovative, and interdisciplinary pedagogical philosophy. In his role as Dean, he represents a governance style that emphasizes meritocracy and transparency and fosters a culture of empathy and belonging. In his spare time, Umberto enjoys wining and dining and the practice of martial arts. Prior to moving to Vietnam, he lived and worked in many places, including Amsterdam, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia.

 

Dr Ben Hutchinson

Dr Ben Hutchinson is a senior researcher in Responsible AI at Google Research. His research includes learning from social sciences to inform the ethical development of AI, with a focus on making language technologies and their development more inclusive. He mainly publishes in the fields of Natural Language Processing and AI Ethics.

Before joining Google Research, Ben spent ten years working as a software engineer on a variety of Google products.

He has a B.A. Hons in Linguistics from the University of Sydney, and a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh.

 

Dr Lindsey De Witt Prat

Dr Lindsey DeWitt Prat is a Director of Research at Bold Insight, where she leads global research initiatives to help organisations understand how cultural and linguistic dynamics shape technology use. An interdisciplinary researcher, author, and translator with more than 15 years of experience bridging academia and industry, Lindsey brings cultural insights to projects spanning 25+ countries, with depth in Japan and East Asia. Her recent publications and speaking engagements focus on pathways to making AI more inclusive and culturally resonant through deep, contextual understanding of people and society. 

Lindsey holds a PhD in Asian Languages & Cultures from UCLA and an MA in International Studies and Comparative Religion from the University of Washington. She is a board member at Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC) and a Senior Fellow at the AI for Developing Countries Forum (AIFOD).

Dr Maïa Ponsonnet

Dr Maïa Ponsonnet is a Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, Dynamique Du Langage, Lyon), and an Adjunct with UWA’s School of Social Sciences.

Maïa’s research concerns expressive language, how emotions are linguistically encoded across the world’s languages, and whether emotional language may channel people’s experience and management of emotions. She has extensive experience working with speakers of Indigenous Australian languages in northern Australia, including Dalabon, Rembarrnga, Kune, and Kriol, all spoken in central Arnhem Land and around the town of Katherine.

Maïa is the author of many articles and books, in particular a 2014 monograph on the encoding of emotions in Dalabon (Gunwinyguan, northern Australia) and a 2020 monograph on a comparison between Dalabon and Kriol, the creole that has replaced Dalabon.

 

  

Dr Jess Kruk

Dr Jess Kruk is a sociolinguist and lecturer in Indonesian Studies at The University of Western Australia (UWA). Her research focuses on identifying and addressing the exclusion of marginalised people from social, economic, and cultural life in Indonesia and Australia.

Jess’s current projects include an investigation of how ethnic minority groups are impacted by the movement of Indonesia's capital, an exploration of how extreme metal musicians in the Asia Pacific write 'metal' lyrics using non-English languages, reimagining and reinvigorating Indonesian language teaching, and enhancing language communication to fight prejudice in the general public.

 

  

Dr Connor Brown

Dr Connor Brown is a linguist at Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring Language and Culture Centre in Kununurra, WA, and an Adjunct Research Fellow in the Discipline of Linguistics at The University of Western Australia (UWA). He received his PhD in Linguistics from UWA in 2024 and is an affiliate member of the Centre for Australian Studies at the University of Cologne.

Connor’s research centres around the structural and social outcomes of language contact. He has extensive experience conducting remote fieldwork in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia and has been working with speakers of Northern Australian Kriol since 2019. Connor has a particular interest in the effect of language contact on the semantic/pragmatic domain. His research on various semantic and pragmatic phenomena in Australian contact varieties provides insight to this question.

A large part of Connor’s research is also informed by community collaboration. Since 2020 he has been working with Kriol speakers in the Kununurra region on various community-led projects. This includes the development of an orthography for varieties of Kriol spoken in the East Kimberley, and Kriol-medium resources for language revitalisation.  

 

Sharon Davis

Sharon Davis (they/them) is a non-binary Bardi and Kija person from the Kimberley in Western Australia and is the inaugural CEO of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Corporation. With education degrees from University of Notre Dame Broome and University of Oxford, they have worked for more than a decade in First Nations education, leading key initiatives at both national and state levels. Sharon currently serves on the boards of Reconciliation Australia and the Aurora Education Foundation and is an Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia. 

  

Dr Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway

Dr Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway's research interests centre on language structure, language shift, and connections between the two.

While all languages change, those that are endangered can do so in ways that are particularly rapid and profound. Amanda works to describe the kinds of grammatical changes that minority languages undergo when they are in intense contact with larger, more socially dominant languages. She has been collaborating with speakers of Mudburra, a language of the central Northern Territory in Australia, since 2016, and she bases most of her investigations on the wealth of data that this partnership affords.

Amanda is interested in the practical as well as the theoretical implications of her research. In addition to authoring works for academic journals and conferences, she has helped create language resources for the Mudburra community such as storybooks, posters, and videos. She also co-authored the 2019 Mudburra to English Dictionary and co-designed a series of workshops for educators on how to incorporate this dictionary in the local school curriculum.

 

Daniel Midgley

Daniel Midgley is a linguist, educator, and science communicator. He has taught thousands of students over his career at UWA and Edith Cowan University, and thousands more through his media outreach. He has designed and taught first- and second-year units in Linguistics and in Education, where he delivered the Educational Linguistics unit. Daniel received accolades for his teaching in 2007, when he was awarded a High Commendation in the UWA Excellence in Teaching Award. He frequently conducts classes in Linguistics for community members.

Daniel’s academic work is in computational linguistics, where he publishes in speech act theory, machine learning, pragmatics, conversational analysis, and human interaction and technology.

Daniel has extensive media experience. He was host of the linguistics podcast Talk the Talk which aired on RTRFM community radio for ten years, and is currently host of the Because Language podcast. He's also the voice of the Speakeasy on ABC Radio Perth 720, which airs on Thursday mornings at 6.50am.

 

Emily Gilchrist

Emily Gilchrist is a Research Assistant for the Google-funded ‘Aboriginal English Voices’ project, directed by Dr Glenys Collard and A/Prof. Celeste Rodríguez Louro. Emily completed a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) at The University of Western Australia in 2022, majoring in Linguistics and French. During her studies, Emily developed an interest in language variation and change, Australian Indigenous languages, and applied linguistics. Her interest in language education was furthered by a Work Integrated Learning (WIL) internship with the Department of Education in 2021.

Since graduating, Emily has spent time at Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring and the Kimberley Language Resource Centre, helping to prepare the centres’ archival materials for digitisation as part of the ARC Linkage ‘Life after Digitisation: Future-Proofing WA’s Vulnerable Cultural Heritage’ project. This involvement prompted Emily’s present enrolment in a Graduate Diploma in Archives and Records Management at Curtin University. Emily hopes this degree will strengthen her understanding of culturally responsive and sustainable management of linguistic data, especially in a digital environment.

 

Edie Maher

Language specialist Edie Maher works at Bundiyarra – Irra Wangga Language Centre. She has supported languages in the region for more than 20 years as a Wajarri language teacher. As a part of Edie’s role at Bundiyarra, she helps families by researching family connections and helping to build their family tree. She also focuses on developing educational language resources and materials.

Edie is a Nyungar, Palyku and Nyiybarli woman and grew up on Wajarri country in the Murchison area. She attended Tardun Station Mission and then school in South Fremantle, before attending Curtin University where she received her Bachelor of Education degree. Edie’s goal at Bundiyarra is to help maintain the nine languages and to support the language teachers using the languages.

 

Rosie Sitorus

Rosie Sitorus is a linguist with 11 years of experience working with languages in the Midwest, Gascoyne, and Pilbara regions of Western Australia (WA).  

Rosie has worked in various roles at the Bundiyarra - Irra Wangga Language Centre, first as a linguist, then as a consultant, and finally as manager. She has worked mostly on Wajarri, Badimaya, and Thiinma/Warriyangga languages, although she has also engaged with Malgana, Nhanda, Yinggarda, and Ngarlawangga.

Currently, Rosie is a freelance cultural program consultant working with communities in the Midwest, Gascoyne and Pilbara. Previously, she was the language program specialist at the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura Peoples Aboriginal Corporation (PKKPAC), where she incorporated her linguistic, strategic, management, and coordination experience into a new role of establishing a PKKP languages program, one of only a few Prescribed Body Corporate (PBC)-based language programs in WA.

Rosie is also an artist – a musician, poet, and storyteller. Since 2019, she has worked with Thiinma Elder Mr Peter Salmon on a songwriting project, 'Warralgurniya'. Rosie has travelled across WA with Mr Salmon and his band, performing songs written in Thiinma language.

 

Lily Hayward

Lily Hayward is a genderfluid, queer Nyungar yorga (woman) with ancestral connections all over Nyungar Country. They are studying a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in Linguistics, at The University of Western Australia. Lily hopes to integrate their studies of language with the mental health and social and emotional wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Lily is a Research Assistant on the Google-funded ‘Aboriginal English Voices’ project, directed by Dr Glenys Collard and A/Prof. Celeste Rodríguez Louro.

 

Katrina Cox

Katrina Cox (Kat) is a Koreng Nyungar woman who grew up on Yamatji Country in Geraldton. Kat received a Bachelor of Science (Biomedical Science) degree at Murdoch University in 2022. In 2023 she was accepted into the UWA Doctor of Optometry postgraduate course. Having left the course early in 2025, her experiences at UWA highlighted for Kat the many challenges faced by Aboriginal students in postgraduate studies and she is now very passionate about advocating for better pathways, support, and opportunities for these students so they can successfully complete their studies.

Kat is a Research Assistant on the Google-funded ‘Aboriginal English Voices’ project, directed by Dr Glenys Collard and A/Prof. Celeste Rodríguez Louro. The unique design of the project in having Aboriginal fieldworkers and Aboriginal-led data collection aligns with Kat’s belief in ‘Nothing about us without us’. It is her hope that this unique experience will help develop her own research skills and that the long-term outcomes of the project will have far-reaching benefits as AI and Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) become integrated into many facets of everyday life.

Daniel Dennis Colbung

Daniel Dennis Colbung is a Menang Nyungar man from Albany, Western Australia. Daniel is currently studying a Bachelor of Science at The University of Western Australia. His hobbies include playing basketball, going to the gym, reading books, watching movies, listening to music and painting. Daniel is a Research Assistant on the Google-funded ‘Aboriginal English Voices’ project directed by Dr Glenys Collard and A/Prof. Celeste Rodríguez Louro.

 

Madeleine Clews

Born in Canada, Dr Madeleine Clews completed her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) at the University of Saskatchewan where she focused on Old English, Middle English, Old Norse and the History of English under the tutelage of Professor Richard Harris. She completed a D.Phil. qualifying year at Linacre College Oxford in 1984, mentored by Vigfússon Reader in Norse Antiquities Ursula Dronke, before taking a gap year to travel to Australia.

The ‘gap’ ended up lasting for nearly 30 years, during which Madeleine forged a career working as journalist for ABC and eventually spent more than a decade managing corporate communications for various state Government agencies. She left the public service to return to academia in 2019, completing her PhD in Linguistics, focusing on historical sociolinguistics and dialectology, with a particular focus on English in Western Australia. 

Madeleine’s post-doctoral research is concerned with developing a corpus of Late Modern English ego-documents representing post-colonial varieties including Australian, Canadian and Singapore English. 

 

  

Lucia Fraiese

Lucía Fraiese is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at The University of Western Australia (UWA), where she also works as a tutor and research assistant in Linguistics and the Language Lab. Her doctoral research, generously supported by a UWA University Postgraduate Award and an RTP Scholarship, is the first sociolinguistic ethnography to investigate how First Nations young women use language to create, contest, and maintain social bonds in boarding school settings. Through this work, Lucía challenges deficit-based perspectives on Australian Aboriginal English and youth language, which often disadvantage speakers in education, employment, and legal contexts. Her research highlights the social meaning of linguistic variation and its role in shaping students’ identities and social practices in school.

Lucía is a first-generation university student from the Global South, originally trained as an applied linguist and language teacher in Argentina. She has over a decade of teaching experience across secondary and tertiary institutions in Argentina, the United States, and Australia, and has worked extensively with students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In 2016-2017, she was awarded a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to advance her professional development in the United States. Since 2021, she has been based at UWA, beginning as a Higher Degree by Research (Honours) student investigating discourse-pragmatic variation in Australian English and Aboriginal English.

From 2022 to 2025, Lucía served as the Social Sciences student representative on the Board of Graduate Research at UWA. She has received numerous awards in recognition of her research, including a Graduate Women WA Child Development Scholarship, a UWA Convocation Award, and travel grants from Stanford University, the British Association of Applied Linguistics, and the Australian Research Data Commons. Most recently, she won the 2025 UWA Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition.

Lucía is committed to socially impactful research that serves marginalised and minoritised communities. Her key interests include linguistic variation and social meaning, language and identity, and ethnographic approaches in sociolinguistics.

 

 

Alex Stephenson

Alex Stephenson is a PhD candidate within the broader ‘Life after Digitisation: Future-Proofing WA’s Vulnerable Cultural Heritage’ ARC Linkage project, which is digitising collections of language materials held at four Aboriginal language centres in Western Australia. Alex works with three of those language centres – Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring Language and Culture Centre, Kimberley Language Resource Centre, and Bundiyarra Irra Wangga Language Centre – where he explores post-digitisation futures. In particular, he examines how the perspectives of language centre communities and their representatives can inform processes for the storage, management, and sharing of these language collections in appropriate and context-specific ways. 

Alex holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Chinese Studies and Linguistics, with Honours in Linguistics, where he focused on typologically investigating reflexive expressions having lexicalised an emotional meaning in a sample of languages across Europe, Australia, and Asia.

 

Katharina Froedrich

Katharina Froedrich is an international PhD student in Linguistics and a Forrest Research Foundation doctoral scholar.

Katharina holds a Bachelor and Master of Arts degree in English Linguistics from The University of Munich (LMU), and has a strong background in sociolinguistics, language contact, and pidgin and creole studies.

At UWA, Katharina’s PhD explores Aboriginal English spoken in the Pilbara using collaborative research methods. She is particularly interested in how language use varies depending on context, topic, and interlocutor. As part of her collaboration with the PKKP Aboriginal Corporation in Karratha, she interned with PKKP's Language Team in 2025. Katharina's research also investigates how First Nations people and communities use AI-operated technology for a more inclusive and socially just world. She is currently a member of the Social Committee at Forrest Hall and a member of the GRS HDR Student Consultative Committee at UWA.