Happenings

Journal of Black Language and Culture

First issue coming Autumn 2026!

The LSA's newest journal, the Journal of Black Language & Culture (JBLAC), is open for submissions! It was an honor to collaborate in the proposal and design of this journal, and I'm delighted to see it come to fruition. To learn more about the variety of submission types JBLAC will accept and/or about ways to serve on the Journal's boards, check out its website: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-black-language-and-culture. My article "How Did You Do That: Black Creolists on Linguistic Fieldwork" is under review to appear in the inaugural issue.

Lifting As We Climb

Available for pre-order!

Lifting As We Climb: How Black Faculty Make Professional and Linguistic Choices to Thrive in Higher Education (formerly entitled Talking Faculty) is available for pre-order! In this coauthored book, Kendra Calhoun, Aris Clemons, myself, Anne Charity Hudley, and Kahdeidra Martin provide a resource that combines the linguistic experiences of Black faculty in linguistics and the language sciences with critical information that Black faculty across SBE (Social, Behavioral, and Economic) fields can draw upon as they navigate a career in higher education.

NWAV 53

Ann Arbor (U of Michigan), November 2025

There's something special about returning to your alma mater to share your research. Plus, this was my first time attending the New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference in person! On Thursday, Nov 6, I presented the talk "Adopting a Community-Centered Approach to Teaching about Creole Languages: A Collaboration with Creole Users and Linguists" with Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales and Marlyse Baptista to share the Language Contact & Cognition (LCC) Lab's ongoing work.

LSA Annual Meeting

NOLA, January 2026

My 2026 LSA experience was a busy one! On Saturday, Jan 10, I presented both a poster ("Pragmatic Markers in Dominica Creole: Linguistic and Socio-Cultural Insights from Bradford, UK Fieldwork") about my most recent Dominica Creole research and a talk ("How Did You Do That: Black Creolists on Linguistic Fieldwork") about the article (under review) that I'm contributing to the inaugural issue of the LSA's new Journal of Black Language and Culture. The latter was part of an organized session announcing JBLAC; see more above!

UT-Knoxville Colloquium Talk

Knoxville, Tennessee, April 2025

Thank you to the Linguistics Program at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville for inviting me to be a speaker in your colloquium series! I enjoyed sharing my talk "Creole Language Research that Zooms In & Zooms Out: From Corpora and Fieldwork, to Classrooms and Beyond" with your students and faculty, and I appreciate your helpful feedback. Here's a photo of me setting a talk timer on my watch. :)

LSA Annual Meeting

Philadelphia, January 2025

The 2024 LSA Annual Meeting was a great way to start the year! On Friday, Jan 10, my talk with Sophia Eakins, Alicia Stevers, Yourdanis Sedarous, and Marlyse Baptista, "How We Teach about Creole Languages", shared the Language Contact & Cognition (LCC) Lab's work assessing the state of linguists’ pedagogy regarding Creole languages .

NCFDD Faculty Success Program

Spring 2025

This Spring term, I completed the NCFDD's Faculty Success Program. An incredibl learning experience! Alongside a small group of fellow early-career faculty members, I worked through the 10-week program, learning strategies to increase productivity and improve work-life harmony. Thank you to OSU Linguistics for funding my tuition!

Dominica Creole Fieldwork in Bradford, UK

Fall 2024

This fall, I had the pleasure of spending 3 weeks in Bradford, UK conducting Dominica Creole fieldwork. My research was made possible by OSU and by the ACLS Fellowship program. I couldn't be more grateful to the Dominica Association of Bradford (DA) and to all of the community members (including extended family!) for their support and warm welcome. Many consultants chose to donate their compensation to the DA in support of its community-centered efforts. If you'd like to learn more about DA, visit their website here: https://dominicaassociationbfd.co.uk

Transition to The Ohio State!

Fall 2024

This fall, I'm headed to The Ohio State University (OSU) to join the Department of Linguistics as an Assistant Professor! I'm grateful to OSU Linguistics for their warm welcome and to the University of South Carolina (USC) for the experiences I've had here. I look forward to savoring these last few weeks in Columbia and to starting the next chapter of my faculty journey in Columbus!

ACLS Fellowship

Announced April 2024

This spring, I was delighted to receive the news that I have been awarded a 2024 ACLS Fellowship! I will use the Fellowship's twelve months of support to further develop my Kwéyòl Donmnik research program. Please follow the hyperlink to learn more about my project, "A (Meta)Linguistic Investigation of Pragmatic Markers in Kwéyòl Donmnik".

Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL)

Athens, GA, April 2024

This spring, I had the pleasure of returning to the University of Georgia (GO DAWGS!!!) for SECOL XCI (91)! In my talk "Black Language and Life: Discourses of Academic Trajectories for Black Faculty in the Language Sciences", I spoke about the collaborative work that Kendra Calhoun, Aris Clemons, myself, Anne H. Charity Hudley, and Kahdeidra Monet Martin have done thus far on our in-progress, co-authored book Talking Faculty: The Linguistic and Professional Choices of Black Faculty in U.S. Higher Education. (See "Research" tab for further details.)

LSA Annual Meeting

New York City, January 2024

The 2024 Centennial LSA Annual Meeting was a great way to kick off 2024! On Thursday, Jan 4, my talk with Felicia Bisnath, Sophia Eakins, Alicia Stevers, and Marlyse Baptista, "The MULTI Project: Resources for Enhancing Multi-faceted Creole Representation in the Linguistics Classroom", shared the Cognition, Convergence, and Langugage Emergence Lab's (CCLE) work on The MULTI Project, an online bank of teaching resources that center mis-/underrepresented languages. Next, on Friday, Jan 5, the session I co-organized with Aris Clemons featured preliminary insights from Talking Faculty: The Linguistic and Professional Choices of Black Faculty in US Higher Education, our co-authored book project with Kendra Calhoun, Anne Charity Hudley, and Kahdeidra Martin, as well as talks by several contributors to Anne Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz's Oxford volume Decolonizing Linguistics (In Press).

Year 1 at USC -- complete!

Spring 2023

My first year as a faculty member at the University of South Carolina has flown by! I'm grateful for the positive connections I've made with colleagues and students, I've enjoyed teaching Spring courses on Creole and Pidgin languages and African American English, and I made my first trip by plane since the COVID-19 outbreak to present with research collaborators at the 2023 LSA in Denver. I'm also excited to announce that I've been awarded a 2023-2024 Excel Grant for my work on the Talking Faculty book project (see Research page for details). Feeling hopeful that the fall will bring new adventures!

First Semester at USC

Fall 2022

It's been an exciting first semester at the University of South Carolina! I've thoroughly enjoying getting better acquainted with my new community, teaching my first graduate course (LING 744 Language Contact Phenomena), and sharing my individual and collaborative research with others this semester, and I'm looking forward to what 2023 has in store. Here are a handful of the highlights...

Virtual Invited Talk for the University at Buffalo's Creolist Workshop

Virtual Invited Talk for GA Tech, School of Modern Languages

Virtual Talk at the 5th Intl. Conference of the American Pragmatics Association

Virtual Invited Talk for UNC, Chapel Hill, Linguistics

Joining the Faculty

August 2022

I am thrilled to announce that this fall, I am joining the University of South Carolina’s Department of English and Linguistics Program as an Assistant Professor! So many mentors, family members, and friends came together to support my job search. I am grateful to them for their support and to U of SC’s vibrant community of language scholars for welcoming me so warmly.

#PhDone

Virtual Zoom Event, March 2022

I am excited to share that on March 14, 2022 I successfully defended my dissertation: Powerful "Little Words" in Contact and in Context: Pragmatic Markers in Kwéyòl Donmnik, English, and French. I am so grateful for the support of my Committee (Marlyse Baptista, Sarah Thomason, Susan Gelman, and Diana Ranson), of my family, and of all the friends and fellow scholars who walked with me along the way.

LSA Annual Meeting

Virtually / Washington, DC, January 2022

I kicked off the new year by participating virtually in the LSA annual meeting. My talk "Intuitions, Corpora, and Literature: Examining Pragmatic Markers in Kwéyòl Donmnik, English, and French" detailed my dissertation work, which incorporates corpus analysis, speakers' metalinguistic knowledge, and an experimental task into a project centered on pragmatic markers in Kwéyòl and its superstrates.

Creole Languages and Linguistics Teaching Workshop

Virtual Zoom Event, November 2021

The U of M Cognition, Convergence and Language Emergence Research Group (Director: Marlyse Baptista) hosted a virtual workshop for Language Experts (speakers of Kwéyòl Donmnik, Trinidadian Creole, and Cabo Verdean Creole) and for Linguists. The 1-hour event brought together participants in our Revitalizing Attitudes towards Creole Languages project and eight of the Research Group's team members; myself and Ariana Bancu (project co-leads) had the honor of hosting. The workshop was centered on three goals. First, to bring Language Experts and Linguists together in a virtual "room". Second, to create space in that "room" for Language Experts and Linguists to share and discuss names for a perceptions of the languages they spoke/researched -- and to learn from each other through those open dialogues. And third, to generate together recommendations for equitably integrating Creole language into linguistics teaching. The workshop was an exhilerating success, and I am thankful to everyone who contributed!

LCUGA7 Conference Talk

Hybrid Gather Event, October 2021

It was such a pleasure to present highlights from my dissertation research virtually at the 7th Annual Linguistics Conference at the University of Georgia (LCUGA7). The conference theme was "Language and Connection". In addition to being hosted by my alma mater, LCUGA holds a special place in my heart as the first linguistics conference I ever attended back when I was an MA student there. The organizers did an excellent job coordinating this hybrid event. To learn more about linguistics at UGA, visit the conference website at https://linguistics.uga.edu/lcuga-7.

UofSC Colloquium Talk

Virtual Zoom Event, October 2021

There's nothing like sharing your dissertation research with fellow linguists for the first time! I thoroughly enjoyed giving this "Little Words" colloquium talk virtually for the University of South Carolina's Linguistics Program. I'm grateful for the insightful questions I received from the scholars who attended and excited to incorporate their feedback! To learn more about the UofSC Linguistics Program, visit their website at https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/artsandsciences/linguistics/index.php.

UM Preparing Future Faculty Seminar

Virtual Zoom Event, May - June 2021

Thanks to a fantastic team of organizers from University of Michigan's Center for Research on Learning and Teaching and the Rackham School of Graduate Studies, I had the privilege of completing this year's Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) Seminar. This five-week, nationally-recognized program guides graduate students through preparation for the academic job search. It includes interactive lectures on a full range of topics from the landscape of higher education to inclusive teaching practices, panel sessions with academic professionals, a campus visit (virtual this year!) to a college or university in Michigan, and scaffolded guidance and peer-review for crafting job search application documents. I was thrilled to be accepted into the program and am proud to have earned my Preparing Future Faculty Certificate. For more about PFF, visit https://crlt.umich.edu/programs/pffseminar .

UC Davis Language Research Symposium

Virtual Zoom Event, May 2021

I'm really getting into this virtual style of conference presenting. Giving talks "around the country" has expanded my horizons, and I've received excellent feedback each and every time. My presentation at UC Davis' Language Research Symposium (entitled "Bare Nouns and Determiners in Kwéyòl Donmnik: A Corpus-Based and Experimental Study of Discourse-Pragmatic Features") was no exception. For more about the conference or to access the abstracts, visit https://www.languagecluster.com/symposium.

UofSC Student Research Symposium

Virtual Zoom Event, April 2021

I had the pleasure of giving a virtual presentation at the University of South Carolina's Research Symposium. My talk was entitled "Form Meets Context: A Corpus-Based and Experimental Study of Bare Nouns and Determiners in Kwéyòl Donmnik", and the link tree for the entire event (including abstracts, etc.) can be found here: https://linktr.ee/spudmc10. Dr. Tracey Weldon's keynote on Middle Class AAE really spoke to me!

UGA Linguistics Digital Colloquium

Virtual Zoom Event, February 2021

I had a blast giving a virtual colloquium talk for the University of Georgia’s Department of Linguistics. I'm a UGA alumna (GO DAWGS!), and it was such a pleasure to share my research and get great feedback while also reconnecting with the scholars who first introduced me to the field. The title of my talk was “Language in Context and in Contact: The Pragmatics of Multifunctional Items in Kwéyòl Donmnik", and the event announcement and abstract can be found on the UGA Linguistics website here: linguistics.uga.edu/events/content/2021/joy-peltier-presents-language-context-and-contact-pragmatics-multifunctional.

U of M Linguistics Graduate Student Colloquium

Virtual Zoom Event, November 2020

My colleague Moira Saltzman and I had the honor of sharing our research with our U of M Linguistics family as speakers at the Fall 2020 Graduate Student Colloquium. This was my first time giving a talk virtually (entitled "The Pragmatics of Multifunctional Items in Kwéyòl Donmnik, French, and English"), and I am relieved to say it went quite smoothly! The Q & A session was incredibly helpful, and it was a pleasure getting to chat with everyone who could make it to the post-colloquium social. The full article announcing the colloquium on the department's webpage can be found here: https://lsa.umich.edu/linguistics/news-events/all-events.detail.html/77838-19933632.html.

LSA Annual Meeting

New Orleans, LA, January 2020

I started off the new decade by traveling to New Orleans to participate in the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). My poster detailed the insights I've gained into Kwéyòl Donmnik's deictic nominal marking system through the lenses of co-speech gesture, specificity, and information status. If you'd like to discuss my presentation or request a copy of my visual materials, feel free to contact me!

Yale University's "Meaning in Flux"

New Haven, CT, October 2019

I had the distinct honor of giving a talk at the 2019 Meaning in Flux workshop at Yale University on October 11. The three-day conference centered on works-in-progress by researchers studying the fluctuating interplay between form (morphosyntactic, lexical, phonetic, gestural, etc.) and meaning (information structure, semantics, etc.).

My talk, entitled "Pragmatic and semantic influences on the architecture of nominals in Kwéyòl Donmnik: Insights from information status, specificity, and deixis", outlined the preliminary results of my work on KD speakers' use of bare nouns and deictic nominal markers.

The experience was intense and rewarding, from the helpful feedback to the lively intellectual discussions, and I plan to stay in touch with the many inspiring scholars I met during my time in New Haven.

Dominica Country Conference

Roseau, Dominica, August 2019

On August 15, 2019, I gave a talk at the 2019 Dominica Country Conference in Roseau, Dominica. The event was centered on the theme “Creole as Cultural Heritage: Framing, Strengthening and Advocating” and took place at Roseau’s University of the West Indies Open Campus.

The conference featured presentations and public forums aimed at promoting the preservation of Dominica’s creole heritage through language documentation, educational policies, tourism, and the safeguarding of the island’s artistic traditions.

My talk, titled “Documentation, Preservation, and Scientific Exploration of Creole Languages: Insights from Kwéyòl Donmnik Fieldwork,” explored the contributions of modern linguists to the study and promotion of Creole languages and highlighted my own fieldwork with Kwéyòl Donmnik speakers in London, UK, in the summer of 2018.

During my time in Dominica, I met with noted Dominícan anthropologist and historian Lennox Honychurch (shown in the photo above), as well as many of my own family members who still reside on the island.

LSA & SPCL Annual Meetings

New York City, USA, January 2019

To kick off 2019, I traveled to New York City to participate in the annual winter meetings of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) and the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics (SPCL), one of the LSA's sister societies.

My poster for the LSA detailed the progress I've made towards understanding the role of information status in KD speakers' production of bare nouns.

My contribution to the SPCL proceedings was an oral presentation discussing my use of gestural methodologies to untangle the intricacies of KD's definite and demonstrative morphemes. If you'd like to discuss either presentation, feel free to contact me!

Kwéyòl Donmnik Fieldwork

London, UK, June-July 2018

The summer of 2018, I had the pleasure of conducting fieldwork on Kwéyòl Donmnik (KD) in London, UK. Immigration of KD speakers to the UK from Dominica during the Windrush of the 1940s and 50s made this a great alternative site to Dominica itself, which is still suffering from the aftermath of extreme hurricane damages. My research was made possible through funding from my home department and U of M's Rackham Graduate School and International Institute. Thanks to help with recruitment from family members and the Dominica Overseas Nationals Association (DONA), I guided participants through casual conversation, storytelling, and a gestural task. Many participants chose to donate their compensation to DONA in support of its efforts to revitalize use of KD among native and heritage speakers in the London area. If you'd like to learn more about DONA and their work, you can visit their website: http://www.dona.org.uk.

Images drawn from personal photos and organization websites.

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