From Seawolf to Bear to Highlander
Gabriella Licata, who graduated from SSU with an MA in Spanish in 2013, is now a PhD Candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research interests lie at the intersection of linguistics, anthropology, and education, where she uses mixed methodologies to uncover linguistic bias and systemic discrimination. Her dissertation is entitled, Investigating deficit perspectives and raciolinguistic ideologies through language attitude study. In July 2023, Gabriella will be a Postdoctoral Scholar in Spanish Critical Sociolinguistics & Language Education in the LatCrit Sociocultural Linguistics Lab at UC Riverside under the supervision of Dr. Claudia Holguín Mendoza.
During her PhD career, Gabriella has published articles in the Journal of Linguistic Discrimination and the Journal of Experimental Phonetics, among others. She has taught Spanish language courses as well as several seminars in sociolinguistics, including Intro to Raciolinguistics, (De)Colonizing Spanish, Intro to Hispanic Linguistics, and Latinx and Chicanx Sociolinguistics. Gabriella has served as a research mentor through several programs at UC Berkeley, for example, Getting into Grad School, Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program, and Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research Program. Recently, she taught a linguistics course at San Quentin Prison. Gabriella and students inside of the prison have designed a research project examining code-switching and linguistic accommodation among incarcerated people inside the prison, which was approved by the California Department of Corrections and California Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects. She has also worked with the Equity, Gender, and Leadership Center at UC Berkeley to implement inclusive language workshops at tech firms and monitor their effectiveness. We are very pleased to have hosted Gabriella as a lecturer in Spanish for the undergraduate program at SSU where she has taught courses in Spanish language and linguistics. We are very proud of all of her accomplishments!