Biography
Areas of Specialization
English Language, Discourse Analysis, Legal Discourse, Forensic Linguistics, and Rhetoric and Composition
Activities and Interests
In recent years, my work has primarily concerned law and language. I have served as a consultant/expert witness in a variety of cases, from assessing the comprehensibility of jury instructions to examining the available definitions of the name of an American Indian tribe, from the likely common understanding of a sentence to a discourse analysis of a complex financial document. I have also been able to teach a Senior Seminar in Language and Law (Spring 2016) which I will teach again in Spring 2018. Having had the opportunity to host three visiting scholars from China, this spring I have traveled to China to teach a short course on Language and U.S. Law at China University of Political Science and Law. That followed a visit to Shanghai as a plenary speaker at the Center for Appliable Linguistics/Language and Law in December, 2016. Although my primary work remains in language and law, I still support work in rhetoric and composition and presented a graduate course in Writing Program Administration in Spring, 2017. In shared governance, I continue as a member of the University of Washington Faculty Senate and as an elected member of the College Council of the School of Arts and Sciences.