Prior Visiting Scholars and Post-Docs

Jun Nagao, PhD

Visiting Scholar

Dr. Nagao is an Associate Professor at Gifu Shotoku Gakuen University in Gifu, Japan. He received my Ph.D. from Ball State University in Indiana in 2005. At Pitt, I did research with Professor Marta Ortega-Llebaria on effective ways to teach English phonetics, especially prosodic features, to Japanese university students. Dr. Nagao was at the Department from the summer of 2018 through March 2019.

 

Valentyna Ushchyna, PhD

Visiting Fulbright Scholar

VALENTYNA USHCHYNA is a Professor of the English Philology at Lesya Ukrainka Eastern-European National University of Lutsk, Ukraine. Her area of specialization is teaching linguistics and English as a Foreign language and her academic interests concern relations between language, discourse and society. After obtaining her BA and PhD in Linguistics, she spent a year as a visiting scholar at The University of Mississippi in Oxford (USA). Since 2000 she has been teaching a range of courses including stylistics of the English language, discourse studies and sociolinguistics. Her involvement in critical discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics and discourse psychology have led her to focus her research on the notions of risk and stance. She is the author of various articles, monograph chapters and a book "Stancetaking in the English Risk Discourse: A Sociocognitive Perspective" (Vezha-Druk, 2015. In Ukrainian). She came to the USA as a Fulbright grantee to work with Dr. Scott Kiesling (Linguistics Department, University of Pittsburgh) on a research project “Intersubjective Dynamics of Stancetaking on Risk: From Individual Cognition to Social Order”. E-mail: v.ushchyna@gmail.com.

 

Jamison Cooper Leavitt

(postdoc for Dr. Alan Juffs)

 

Jamison's interests are:

-  Speech perception, langauge modeling, speech signal analysis, speech corpora

-  Acoustic analyses of Thai, Tashlhiy (Berber; Southern Morocco), Mboshi (Bantu C25; Congo-Brazzaville)

-  Syntax and semantics of Southeast Asian and West African languaes: Thai, Hmonbg, Edo, Yoruba

- Syllable structure, intonation, vowel epenthesis, tone identification, perceptual experiments, computational modeling of tone, syntax-semantics interface, serial verb constructions, and the semantics of classifiers.

 

 

Noriyasu Harada Li

(postdoc for Dr Alan Juffs)

Noriyasu is a Program Manager on the Alexa International team at Amazon. He directs Spoken Language Understanding improvement and development for Alexa in Japanese, and manages international device launches, most recently, the Echo Dot with Clock and Echo Studio in Brazil. Prior to joining Amazon, he was a postdoc research associate at the University of Pittsburgh under the direction of Dr. Alan Juffs. He received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pittsburgh in 2017. During his PhD studies, he conducted research on SLA, syntax, L2 phonological acquisition, L2 orthographic knowledge and writing development, and acquisition of tense/aspect in Japanese.

 

 

Chen Guangwei

(sponsor: Dr. Alan Juffs)
Guangxi Teachers Education University, China

Guangwei Chen is a faculty member at Guangxi Teachers Education University, Nanning, China, working as full professor of English linguistics, MA supervisor, and chief librarian of the university. He teaches English and conducts research on English teaching and English teacher education. He has been the deputy dean of the School of Foreign Languages since April, 1999, being responsible for the teaching administration affairs of the English speciality. As a visiting scholar to the department of linguistics of the University of Pittsburgh from February 1, 2015 to January 31, 2016, he worked on a research project concerning the cultivation of excellent pre-service English teachers at Normal Universities by working with the faculty and students at the English Language Institute. His research interests are in TEFL, applied linguistics, pragmatics, second language acquisition, and English teacher education.

 

 

Jana Lokajova

(sponsor: E. Maxine Bruhns, Nationality Rooms)

Jana wa a visiting scholar from the Centre of languages at Slovak technical university (STU). She studied at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague where she majored in English linguistics and Slavic studies (2011). Her M.A. thesis dealt with the discourse analysis of communicative strategies that American and British politicians were using in one-to-one interviews; particularly with the concept of political 'non-replying' and 'evasiveness'. As an instructor of English for Science and Engineering at STU, she focuses on the didactic aspect of appropriateness in the course material development and design (2011-2015). In September 2015 she was awarded the Ruth Crawford Mitchell Fellowship Grant at University of Pittsburgh to conduct her research into lexical analysis of different technical English texts.

Jana’s interests include computational linguistics and second language acquisition. In the future, she would like to devise series of e-learning language modules for less commonly taught languages and also help develop an online Slovak corpus database.

 

Ibrahim Salim

(Sponsor: Dr. Lori Levin)
Assiut University, Egypt

 

Ibrahim Salim is a faculty member at the College of Arts of Assiut University in Egypt. He was awarded a fellowship of Assiut University to pursue research in the United States of America as a visiting scholar. His research interests include lexical semantics, morpho-syntax, and translation theory and translation studies. His current studies are mainly concerned with the linguistic problems involved in translating the meanings of the Holy Qur’an from Arabic into English. His research was carried out under the guidance of his advisor Lori Levin, Research Professor at the Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.

 

Iskra Iskrova

postdoctoral fellow
(sponsor: Dr. Shelome Gooden)

 

 

Robert Lawson

(sponsor: Dr. Scott Kiesling)
Birmingham City University, UK

Dr Robert Lawson, a faculty member from Birmingham City University, was the 2012/13 holder of the Scottish Studies Fulbright Award and spent a year at the University of Pittsburgh. As a Fulbright Scholar, Robert worked on a number of projects, including completing a research monograph about language, masculinity and identity in Glasgow, editing a volume on contemporary sociolinguistic research on speech communities in Scotland, and teaching a  

 

Liya Xue

(sponsor: Dr. Shelome Gooden)

Zhejiang University, China

Liya Xue, is a faculty member from the School of International Studies of Zhejiang University in China. She was awarded a fellowship of Zhejiang University to pursue her research in the United States of America as a visiting scholar for one year after the rigid academic evaluation process organized by Zhejiang University in 2013. Her research interests include speech prosody and second language acquisition. Her current studies are mainly concerned with English prosodic disambiguation by Mandarin-speaking ESL learners and English native speakers. While at Pitt she worked on perception and production experiments under the guidance of her advisor Professor Shelome Gooden.  

 

Baoguo Zhou                                           

(sponsor: Dr. Alan Juffs)
Wuhan University, China

Dr. Zhou, Professor of Linguistics, College of Foreign Languages, Wuhan University, China, Director of the Research Institute for Applied Linguistics of Wuhan University, Council member of China Association of Second Language Acquisition Research, Executive member of China Association of Language and Education, was a senior visiting scholar to the department of linguistics of the University of Pittsburgh, from November 2012 to May 2013. His main research interests are linguistic theory, second language acquisition, and language testing. While at the University of Pittsburgh, he worked on two research projects, one concerning acquisition of English articles by Chinese EFL learners, and the other dealing with Chinese learners' mapping of mental time framing in English discourse.