
Dr. Anne Harper Charity Hudley is Professor of Education at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education (GSE) in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) and professor of African and African-American Studies and Linguistics, by courtesy. Professor Charity Hudley was previously the North Hall Endowed Chair in the Linguistics of African America at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was also Faculty in Residence for the Santa Catalina Residences and San Joaquín Villages and the Faculty Fellow for the Center for Innovative Teaching, Research, and Learning (CITRAL).
During her tenure at UC Santa Barbara, Professor Charity Hudley was Director of Undergraduate Research for the Office of Undergraduate Education at UC Santa Barbara. Prior to this, she was the inaugural William and Mary Professor of Community Studies and former Class of 1952 Associate Professor of Education, English, Linguistics, Africana Studies at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. While there, she directed the William and Mary Scholars Program and was the co-director, with Cheryl Dickter, of the William and Mary Scholars Undergraduate Research Experience.
Her research and publications address the relationship between language variation and Pre K-16 educational practices and policies and high impact practices for underrepresented students in higher education. Professor Charity Hudley has published four books with Teachers College Press. Her fourth book, Talking College, is co-authored with Christine Mallinson of the University of Maryland Baltimore County and Mary Bucholtz of the University of California, Santa Barbara and will appear in early 2022. Her third book, The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research, is co-authored with Cheryl Dickter and Hannah Franz of Virginia Commonwealth University. Her first and second books are co-authored with Christine Mallinson with Teachers College Press in their Multicultural Studies Series and Language and Literacy Series, respectively: Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools and We Do Language: English Language Variation in the Secondary English Classroom.
Her other publications appear in journals including: Language, The Journal of English Linguistics, Child Development, Language Variation and Change, American Speech, Language and Linguistics Compass, Perspectives on Communication Disorders and Sciences in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Populations, and in many book collections including the Handbook of African-American Psychology, Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Literacy Education, Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics, and the Oxford Handbook of Language in Society
Professor Charity Hudley has served on the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America. She has also served on the Standing Committee on Research of the National Council of Teachers of English and as a consultant to the National Research Council Committee on Language and Education and to the National Science Foundation’s Committee on Broadening Participation in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Sciences. She has served as an associate editor of Language and co-founded the Teaching Linguistics section of Language. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Sociolinguistics division of Language and Linguistics Compass and on the Linguistic Society of America Committee on Linguistics in Higher Education as an undergraduate program representative and the chair of the subcommittee on diversity. She works with K-12 teachers through lectures and workshops sponsored by public, and independent schools throughout the country as well as by the American Federation of Teachers.Professor Charity Hudley is a native of Richmond, Virginia and attended St. Catherine’s School for 13 years. She earned both a BA and a MA in Linguistics from Harvard University in 1998, and she was awarded a Ford Foundation Pre-Dissertation Fellowship in 2003. From 2003-2005, she was the Thurgood Marshall Dissertation Fellow in residence at Dartmouth College. She earned a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005. Professor Charity Hudley received a National Science Foundation Minority Postdoctoral Fellowship in Fall 2005 and a National Science Foundation Minority Research Starter Grant in 2009 to create workshops on language variation for educators. She won the 2019 Linguistic Society of America Linguistics, Language, and The Public Award for her influence on the classroom experience of users of nonstandard varieties of English. She was the 2009 College of William and Mary nominee for the Virginia State Council of Higher Education Outstanding Faculty Award in the Rising Star category and was also a nominee in 2012 and in 2015 in the general category. The William and Mary chapter of the NAACP and the Student Assembly Department of Diversity Initiatives awarded her the 2010 William and Mary Image Award as the individual who best embodies the spirit of a vibrant and diverse William and Mary community.

Dr. Hannah Franz (she/her) is the Program Associate for Graduate Advisement at the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. She was previously the Focused Inquiry Learning Lounge (FILL) Director at Virginia Commonwealth University. As FILL Director, Hannah created a peer education program for a diverse population of students in first-year seminar/first-year writing courses.
Hannah has a PhD in Educational Policy, Planning, and Leadership from the College of William & Mary; an MSEd in Reading/Writing/Literacy from the University of Pennsylvania; an MA in Linguistics from North Carolina State University; and a BA in Linguistics from William & Mary.
Hannah’s scholarship focuses on equity in high-impact educational practices, such as undergraduate research and writing-intensive courses. She co-authored The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success in and Beyond College (Teachers College Press) with Dr. Anne Charity Hudley and Dr. Cheryl Dickter. The Students’ Right to Their Writing guides are based in part on Hannah’s dissertation.
Dr. Michelle Grue’s interdisciplinary research in Education and Writing draws on Black feminist, digital and African American rhetorics, and critical race/anti-racist education theories to investigate diversity issues in academia. Her current research project is a digital and rhetorical analysis of Instagram hosted, Person of Color community-formed digital archives. She was co-lead in a joint study with Black studies and sociology to grade sociology PhD departments on how well they prepare their students to research and teach on issues of race and gender. Her dissertation research expanded and adapted that project in the context of writing, rhetoric, and composition PhD programs. Grue’s master’s thesis explored how Black female faculty utilize the digital environment to mitigate isolation, share their research, and cultivate a national and international reputation. Michelle enjoys using her pedagogical and theoretical knowledge with the same diverse student population that inhabits the focus of her research. She recently earned her PhD in Education with a writing emphasis through the Girvetz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She is grateful to have become an Assistant Teaching Professor at UCSB, teaching in both the Writing Program and the College of Creative Studies.

Sierra J. Johnson is a Linguistics major obtaining her bachelor’s degree at the College of William and Mary. Much of her scholarship includes first language acquisition of black, non-custodial parents and their linguistic impacts on their progeny regarding Black American English. She is passionate about limiting linguistic discrimination in higher academia and continuing the legacy of advocacy for uplifting the voices of her fellow bidialectal students, especially those who are native speakers of Black American English. Being black in America is something that she is confronted with in society and academia on a consistent basis. With linguistic discrimination being one of the most socially accepted forms of discrimination, she hopes that participating in scholarship that could help alleviate some of those issues will prevent others from enduring those linguistic burdens.

Marie Tano is a PhD student in Stanford’s Linguistics department. She holds a BA in Cognitive Science from Pomona College, with a double minor in Linguistics and Africana Studies. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, her senior thesis examined how Black-accented speakers are affected by reverse linguistic stereotyping, and how online uses of African-American English further anti-Black stereotypes. She has also co-authored a manuscript with Dr. Nicole Holliday titled ““It’s a Whole Vibe”: testing evaluations of grammatical and ungrammatical AAE on Twitter.” She is especially interested in applying psycholinguistic approaches to this question of what it means to “sound Black,” as well as understanding how language is used to perform gender and sexuality.

Angela Rowell graduated from UC Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Media Studies and a minor in English. She is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at San Francisco State University. Her involvement with the Students’ Right to Their Own Writing project aligns with her goal of learning how to uplift the language, voices, communication systems, and stories of Black students.
This work is sponsored by a CCCC Research Initiative Grant.