I am a historical linguist specializing in languages of Southeast Asia, with a focus on Thai and other languages in the Tai branch of the Kra-Dai language family. Starting in Fall 2025, I am an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Binghamton University and director of the Dockum Linguistics Lab. I am part of the Linguistics Program and the Department of Anthropology.

See my projects, past and current: Research
Discover the courses I have taught: Teaching
Get the complete view of my experience: CV
Learn a bit of what makes me tick: About Me

I completed my PhD in 2019, with a dissertation titled The Tonal Comparative Method: Tai Tone in Historical Perspective. I work on topics including sound change in tonal languages, language documentation, evolutionary linguistics, language contact in Southeast Asia, and Southeast Asian epigraphy. I have a strong interest in methodology and data quality: I am just as interested in how to best approach research questions, and thinking about issues with the datasets we choose, as in the specific answers to them, because you can’t truly separate the two.

I also work on inclusion in linguistics, turning the analytical lens on the field itself and calling for positive change. See for my work calling for a Big Tent approach to defining the field of Linguistics.

I’ve lived in Thailand off and on since 2002, adding up to about a decade out of that time. Before moving back to the US in 2013 for graduate school, I spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar in Thailand working on Thai epigraphy, studying the language used in the stone inscriptions of the Sukhothai Era. I also worked on a large variety of projects at SEALang.net, including building assistive tools for Thai language learning, compiling contemporary and historical dictionaries of Southeast Asia, creating the Southeast Asian Linguistics Archive, the Pacific Linguistics archive, the NUSA archive, the Zorc Papers, and other projects related to archival preservation and aggregating large lexical datasets.

Beginning in 2014 I worked on language documentation in northwestern Myanmar, on minority Tai languages spoken outside the core Shan area. My fieldwork focuses on the variety of Tai Khamti [kht] that is spoken in the Upper Chindwin River Valley. Many of my field recordings, texts, and wordlists are published in my Tai Khamti archive on PARADISEC.