Catherine Travis is Professor of Modern European Languages in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the ANU, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She holds a Bachelor of Asian Studies with First Class Honours in Linguistics and Japanese from the ANU, and a PhD in Linguistics and Spanish from La Trobe University (2002). She came to the ANU in 2012 from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA, where she worked for 10 years. She is a NAATI certified translator, Spanish-English.

BA/AS (Hons) ANU, PhD La Trobe

Catherine’s research interests lie in questions related to the ways in which linguistic and social factors impact on language variation and change. She works within the variationist framework, and addresses these questions through the study of the spontaneous spoken language of members of well-defined speech communities. Her primary current research projects include 'Voices of Regional Australia', examining regional Australian English using data from bushfire stories (funded by an ARC DP); the 'Sydney Speaks' project, examining variation and change in English spoken in Sydney, by diverse communities including migrant communities (funded as part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language; http://www.dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/sydney-speaks/); the Language Data Commons of Australia project, which is building digital infrastructure for the Humanities (funded through the ARDC, https://ardc.edu.au/news/a-national-language-data-commons-for-australia/); and the New Mexico Spanish-English codeswitching project, examining the Spanish of a bilingual community in New Mexico, USA (deriving from a project funded by the NSF; https://nmcode-switching.la.psu.edu/nmseb).