The Language Lab

Our members

Dr Celeste Rodriguez Louro (Director)

Dr Celeste Rodriguez Louro is Director of the Language Lab, Linguistics Discipline Chair and Major Coordinator, and Australian Research Council fellow in Linguistics at The University of Western Australia (UWA). She is also Vice-President of the Australian Linguistic Society, Editorial Board Member for the Australian Journal of Linguistics, and area consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. She is a member of the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Working Party at UWA and presenter of ‘Language Lab’, a language and diversity segment on The Agenda, RTRFM radio. Celeste has recently worked with the Heart Foundation to produce two original medical videos fully scripted in Aboriginal English.

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. Celeste is also interested in decolonisation and in ways to make academic work sustainable, inclusive, equitable and collaborative. Her publications have appeared in high-ranking international journals. Her work has featured in more than 80 peer-reviewed conferences, including recent invited international plenaries and panels. She has won multiple research and teaching awards and has a strong media presence, a testament to her commitment to making linguistics available to a wide audience.

Celeste is currently writing, in collaboration with Nyungar scholar Glenys Collard, a monograph titled ‘Variation and change in Aboriginal English’ – contracted to Cambridge University Press for publication in 2024. This work is funded through a highly competitive Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship.

With her PhD students, Celeste is developing a bespoke online course for primary and secondary school educators in Australia. Funded through a UWA Impact Grant, this offering will go live soon.

 

Dr Luisa Miceli

Dr Luisa Miceli is Lecturer in Linguistics at UWA. 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 reconstruction. These insights are particularly relevant in understanding the linguistic past of languages that have evolved in predominantly multilingual contexts, such as the Indigenous languages of Australia.

Luisa teaches across a wide range of units in the Linguistics major. She 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.

Luisa is a consultant for the Oxford English Dictionary, advising on etymologies that have origins in Australian Indigenous Languages.

  

Dr Mitch Browne

Dr Mitch Browne completed a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Linguistics at UWA in 2016. He was a Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language PhD student at the University of Queensland, graduating in 2021. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Macquarie University, Sydney and an Adjunct Researcher at UWA.

Mitch’s work focuses on the documentation of traditional Australian languages, especially Warlmanpa. Warlmanpa is presently spoken in and around Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory, and Mitch has conducted extensive fieldwork in remote communities, working collaboratively with speakers of the language. Beyond the documentation of endangered languages, Mitch is interested in the grammatical structures of language and what they can tell us about language as a cognitive system.

 

Dr Iryna Khodos

Dr Iryna Khodos specialises in bilingualism, additional language education, language processing, and language behaviours in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CaLD) communities.

She was awarded her PhD at the University of Newcastle for her innovative investigation of the ways language experiences interplay with language and non-language outcomes in CaLD bilinguals.

In acknowledgement of her expertise, she was competitively selected by the University of Oslo to apply for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship. She was also invited to join the Australian Association for Research in Education and Cognition and Emotion Group. As their member, she engages in providing targeted language support for CaLD communities in Australia and improving language use experiences of a wide range of bilinguals.

Iryna is passionate about teaching. She has a strong record of teaching in the areas of English Language, TESOL, and Applied Linguistics. She also has ample experience fostering culturally inclusive education across Australia. 

  

Dr Jess Kruk

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

Her 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.

  

Glenys Collard

Glenys Collard is a Nyungar scholar who has been working for and with the Nyungar people across WA for over 30 years. She is Honorary Research Fellow in Linguistics at UWA and area consultant for The Oxford English Dictionary. She has contributed extensively to understanding history, language and culture in Nyungar country and beyond.

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.

Glenys is a published author and has taught workshops to thousands of teachers and university students in WA. She is currently working with Dr Celeste Rodriguez Louro (UWA) on several projects examining change and identity in Aboriginal English. Glenys has recently collaborated with the Heart Foundation to produce two original medical videos fully scripted in Aboriginal English.

 

Sharon Davis

Sharon is a proud Bardi Kija person and the acting Executive Director of Research and Education at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS).

Sharon is an accomplished education specialist with a Bachelor's degree in Education and a Master's in Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition from the University of Oxford.

Sharon has steered educational change across complex state and national organisations, including her previous work leading Aboriginal Education at Catholic Education Western Australia. At AIATSIS, Sharon leads, engages in, and delivers high quality interdisciplinary research by, for and with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Sharon is a proud board member of both Reconciliation Australia and The Stronger Smarter Institute.

 

Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway

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.

 

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.

She is the author 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.  

  

Connor Brown

Connor Brown is a PhD candidate whose research is centred on the semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics of contact languages in Australia. He has previously worked on the interface between morpho-syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in an eastern variety of Australian Kriol and the mixed language, Light Warlpiri.

His PhD research is concerned with the temporal semantics of an East Kimberley variety of Kriol, and he has been collaborating with Kriol speakers in Kununurra since 2019. Community engagement has informed a large part of Connor's work, and since beginning his research in Kununurra, Connor has worked closely with the local language centre, Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring. This work has included helping to facilitate the revitalisation program for one of the local languages, Miriwoong, as well as the development of an orthography for the local Kriol variety, at the request of the community.

 

Madeleine Clews

Born in Canada, Madeleine Clews completed her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) at the University of Saskatchewan in 1983 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 2015 and is now a PhD candidate in Linguistics at UWA. Her main interest is historical sociolinguistics, with a particular focus on English in Western Australia. She is currently exploring state colonial records for evidence of early dialect formation in the context of ‘history from below’.

  

Lucia Fraiese

Lucía began a PhD in Linguistics at UWA as a fully funded international student in 2022.

Her research explores how First Nations teens use language to create, contest, and maintain bonds in the boarding school. She is interested in how individuals form social styles and social identities through language.

Lucía also currently works as a remote Social Media Assistant for the Australian Linguistic Society and is the Social Sciences Higher Degree by Research Student Representative at the Board of Graduate Research.