Team Bio

In 2014, Robin Aronow traveled to Ecuador to get away for some hiking, and her encounters with Kichwa speakers peeked her academic interest. After returning, her student, Brian Okum, also became interested, and thus the project was formed. Denis Kelleher arrived on the scene in 2015 and joined in field research last November. In 2016, Tessa Molnar and Katie Clarkson joined as the 4th and 5th members who will travel to Ecuador this August.

Robin Aronow

I teach Phonetics and Phonology, Psycholinguistics, and Sociolinguistics at Temple University and enjoy a tremendous rapport with my students.
I spend a large amount of my time with students mentoring in academic excellence and providing with as much exposure to 'the field' as possible. My research topics include perception of foreign languages syllabic structures, vowel shifting in Farsi, (Modern Persian), and most recently, the survival of several dialects of the northern highlands of Ecuador. I lived in Paris, France for 14 years and have been involved in translating literature on Autism into French. I am an avid mountain climber/hiker and have been known to coax my students into joining me.

Brian Okum

I graduated from Temple University in 2015 with a B.A. in Linguistics and a Minor in English. I am currently working in the legal and political fields temporarily before I decide upon specific plans for graduate school. My academic interests include post-development theory, political science, and language contact from sociolinguistic and ethnographic points of view. Until I reach those 'dissertation days', I have grand plans of thru-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, moving somewhere where the summers aren't so hot, and finally having the chance to read everything on my bookshelf that isn't related to linguistics.

Tessa Molnar

I am studying Linguistics and French at Temple University, and will be graduating in 2018. I am primarily interested in theoretical linguistics, and have been involved with several phonology projects, including Prof. Robin Aronow's research on Persian vowels. When I am not in the lab analyzing spectrograms, I enjoy hiking, skiing, and the fine arts.

Katie Clarkson

I am a graduate student at Temple University studying Spanish Sociolinguistics and Latin American Culture. I received my Master's Degree in Spanish Literature from the University of California Davis in 2014. While an undergraduate at Hamline University in Minnesota, I spent a semester living and working in Quito, Ecuador at a domestic violence shelter. I also spent a year teaching English at two Mexican universities in Oaxaca. My research interests include discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and L2 Acquisition, language extinction (particularly of indigenous languages), bilingualism, and translation studies.

Denis Kelleher

I am a continuing education student at Temple University studying Linguistics and Speech-Language Pathology. I am a graduate of Rutgers University-Camden, where I studied under Richard Epstein, focusing on semantics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and examining the roles of diagrammatic iconicity and arbitrariness in the motivation of linguistic form.
My current research interests include L1 & L2 Acquisition, language contact, diglossia, and pidginization, as well as topics in semantics, such as deixis and prototype theory.