Hello,
a bit about me:
I received my Ph.D. from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. My dissertation, "Cross-Categorial Definiteness/Familiarity," explored the semantics of the Akan definite determiner found in the nominal and clausal domains. My committee members included Professors Simon Charlow (chair), Veneeta Dayal, Viviane Deprez, and Malte Zimmerman (external).
I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania.
I recently concluded a one-year term as Visiting Assistant Professor and Presidential Fellow at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, from July 2024 to July 2025. Prior to that, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Boston College in Boston, Massachusetts, from July 2021 to July 2024.
As a semanticist, my research focuses on the contributions of African languages to linguistic theory. I apply current syntactic and semantic theories to Akan, a Niger-Congo language spoken in Ghana, and other Kwa languages to account for empirical data and to support or challenge existing theories. My goal is to inspire native-speaker linguists to engage in formal syntactic and semantic analyses of African languages. My research interests include the expression of definiteness, as well as modality, tense, aspect, and serial verb constructions.
I have taught diverse audiences and multiple courses. In addition to core linguistics courses such as semantics, morphology, syntax, and phonology, I offer three courses on African languages: (i) the role of African languages in shaping linguistic theory, (ii) the socio-economic effects of multilingualism across the continent, and (iii) the influence of English in post-colonial Africa and the Caribbean, including analysis of pidgins, creoles, and their relationships to Black American English.