JIM MCCLOSKEY SPEAKS AT UC DAVIS AND CATCHES UP WITH ARIEL LORING

In the final week of Winter Quarter, Jim McCloskey travelled to UC Davis for a talk jointly sponsored by the Departments of Linguistics and English on the cultural politics of language attrition and their expression in Irish literature. While in Davis, Jim re-connected with alumna Ariel Loring. Ariel is a fourth year student in the PhD program in linguistics at Davis and advanced to candidacy at the beginning of this year. She graduated from UCSC in 2008, with a B.A. in linguistics, and in her last quarter she took Ling 80C (Language, Society, and Culture) to satisfy a general education requirement. She was sufficiently taken with the material of that course to decide that she wanted to be an applied sociolinguist and that is why she entered the program at Davis. Her first qualifying paper was on monolingual English-only ideologies in the U.S. and its effect on bilingual education policies, a topic she was first introduced to in 80C. Ariel’s dissertation research is centered on a set of issues around citizenship and language policy and she expects to defend her thesis at the end of the 2012-13 academic year. She hopes to go on to work in applied sociolinguistics either in an academic or public policy setting.