Our members

Associate Professor Celeste Rodriguez Louro (Director)

Associate Professor Celeste Rodriguez Louro is Director of the Language Lab, Linguistics Discipline Chair, and Australian Research Council fellow in Linguistics at The University of Western Australia (UWA). She has recently been awarded a highly competitive Visiting Fellowship to spend Hilary Term 2026 at All Souls College, University of Oxford (14% success rate). Celeste is a member of UWA's Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) Think Tank, Editorial Board Member for the Australian Journal of Linguistics, and area consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. From 2022 to 2024, she presented the award-winning radio show Language Lab, a Linguistics segment on RTRFM 92.1. Celeste works with the Heart Foundation to decolonise the production of medical media for First Nations communities. She has partnered with Google on a project which will ensure inclusive technology for First Nations people in Australia.

Trained in Argentina, the USA and Australia, Celeste’s research tracks language change across time. Her work deals with macro sociolinguistic issues including standard language ideologies, language contact, and multilingualism. Underpinned by the sociolinguistic principle of linguistic gratuity ("giving back"), Celeste is interested in decolonisation and in ways to create sustainable work and planetary health. Her recent focus is on making technologies inclusive and equitable, underscoring the crucial role of humans in creating language models. Her publications have appeared in high-ranking international journals. Her work has featured in more than 100 peer-reviewed conferences, including multiple invited international plenaries and panels. She has won several research and teaching awards and has a strong media presence, a testament to her commitment to making Humanities and Social Science available to a wide audience.

Celeste is currently writing, in collaboration with Nyungar scholar Glenys Collard, a monograph titled ‘Variation and change in Aboriginal English’ – contracted to Cambridge University Press. This work is funded through a highly competitive Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship (16% success rate).

 

Dr Luisa Miceli

Dr Luisa Miceli is Lecturer in Linguistics at UWA. Her research program involves three interrelated strands: language evolution/reconstruction of the linguistic past, language processing in bilinguals, and Australian Indigenous languages. Her research on bilingual processing provides novel insights on mechanisms of language change which then inform reconstruction. These insights are particularly relevant in understanding the linguistic past of languages that have evolved in predominantly multilingual contexts, such as the Indigenous languages of Australia.

Luisa teaches across a wide range of units in the Linguistics major. She is also in charge of the Work Integrated Learning program which gives Linguistics students the opportunity to gain valuable experience as professional linguists in different organisations, including community language centres, the WA Department of Education, and RTRFM radio.

Luisa is a consultant for the Oxford English Dictionary, advising on etymologies that have origins in Australian Indigenous Languages.

  

Professor Clint Bracknell

Clint Bracknell is a Noongar song-maker, composer, and Professor of Music at The University of Western Australia.

He investigates connections between song, language, and landscapes while working on projects to improve Indigenous community access to cultural heritage collections.

Clint received the 2020 Barrett Award for Australian Studies and has co-translated world-first Indigenous language works in film and theatre. He serves as Deputy Chair of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) Council and maintains a significant creative research agenda, leading development of the Mayakeniny Noongar performance resource and releasing music under the name Maatakitj. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

 

Professor Umberto Ansaldo

Professor Umberto Ansaldo is a linguist who specialises in language contact and documentary linguistics in the Asia-Pacific. His research covers Creoles of the Indian Ocean, typology of Asian languages, and evolutionary linguistic theory.

Umberto has held professorial as well as leadership appointments at top universities in Asia, Europe and Australia. He is currently developing a research agenda that brings together the study of indigenous knowledge systems and socio-ecological  resilience looking at climate migrants across Southeast Asia.

Umberto holds an honorary professorship with The University of Hong Kong and an adjunct position in the Discipline of Linguistics, The University of Western Australia.

 

Dr Ben Hutchinson

Dr Ben Hutchinson is a senior researcher in Responsible AI at Google Research. His research includes learning from social sciences to inform the ethical development of AI, with a focus on making language technologies and their development more inclusive. He mainly publishes in the fields of Natural Language Processing and AI Ethics.

Before joining Google Research, Ben spent ten years working as a software engineer on a variety of Google products.

He has a B.A. Hons in Linguistics from the University of Sydney, and a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh.

 

Dr Mitch Browne

Dr Mitch Browne completed a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Linguistics at UWA in 2016. He was a Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language PhD student at the University of Queensland, graduating in 2021. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Macquarie University, Sydney and an Adjunct Researcher at UWA.

Mitch’s work focuses on the documentation of traditional Australian languages, especially Warlmanpa. Warlmanpa is presently spoken in and around Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory, and Mitch has conducted extensive fieldwork in remote communities, working collaboratively with speakers of the language. Beyond the documentation of endangered languages, Mitch is interested in the grammatical structures of language and what they can tell us about language as a cognitive system.

 

Dr Maïa Ponsonnet

Dr Maïa Ponsonnet is a Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, Dynamique Du Langage, Lyon), and an Adjunct with UWA’s School of Social Sciences.

Maïa’s research concerns expressive language, how emotions are linguistically encoded across the world’s languages, and whether emotional language may channel people’s experience and management of emotions. She has extensive experience working with speakers of Indigenous Australian languages in northern Australia, including Dalabon, Rembarrnga, Kune, and Kriol, all spoken in central Arnhem Land and around the town of Katherine.

She is the author many articles and books, in particular a 2014 monograph on the encoding of emotions in Dalabon (Gunwinyguan, northern Australia) and a 2020 monograph on a comparison between Dalabon and Kriol, the creole that has replaced Dalabon.  

  

Dr Jess Kruk

Jess Kruk is a sociolinguist and lecturer in Indonesian Studies at UWA. Her research focuses on identifying and addressing the exclusion of marginalised people from social, economic, and cultural life in Indonesia and Australia.

Her current projects include an investigation of how ethnic minority groups are impacted by the movement of Indonesia's capital, an exploration of how extreme metal musicians in the Asia Pacific write 'metal' lyrics using non-English languages, reimagining, and reinvigorating Indonesian language teaching and enhancing language communication to fight prejudice in the general public.

  

Dr Connor Brown

Dr Connor Brown is a linguist at Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring Language and Culture Centre in Kununurra, WA, and an Adjunct Research Fellow in the Discipline of Linguistics at The University of Western Australia. He received his PhD in Linguistics from The University of Western Australia in 2024, and is an affiliate member of the Centre for Australian Studies at the University of Cologne.

His research centres around the structural and social outcomes of language contact. He has extensive experience conducting remote fieldwork in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia and has been working with speakers of Northern Australian Kriol since 2019. Connor has a particular interest in the effect of language contact on the semantic/pragmatic domain. His research on various semantic and pragmatic phenomena in Australian contact varieties provides insight to this question.

A large part of Connor’s research is also informed by community collaboration. Since 2020 he has been working with Kriol speakers in the Kununurra region on various community-led projects. This includes the development of an orthography for varieties of Kriol spoken in the East Kimberley, and Kriol-medium resources for language revitalisation.   

 

Glenys Collard

Glenys Collard is a Nyungar scholar who has been working for and with the Nyungar people across WA for over 30 years. She is Honorary Research Fellow in Linguistics at UWA and area consultant for The Oxford English Dictionary. She has contributed extensively to understanding history, language and culture in Nyungar country and beyond.

Glenys was the first to record the Nyungar language with elders Mr Humphries and Mr Bennell and has chaired multiple state-level and national committees.

Glenys is a published author and has taught workshops to thousands of teachers and university students in WA. She is currently working with Dr Celeste Rodriguez Louro (UWA) on several projects examining change and identity in Aboriginal English. Glenys has recently collaborated with the Heart Foundation to produce two original medical videos fully scripted in Aboriginal English.

 

Sharon Davis

Sharon is a non-binary person from both Bardi and Kija peoples of the Kimberley, and until recently was the inaugural Director of Education at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS).

Sharon is an accomplished education specialist with a Bachelor's degree in Education, and a Master's in Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition from the University of Oxford. Sharon has steered educational change across complex state and national organisations, including previous work leading Aboriginal Education across Catholic Education Western Australia.

Sharon is also a proud board member of both Reconciliation Australia and The Stronger Smarter Institute.

  

Dr Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway

Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway's research interests centre on language structure, language shift, and connections between the two.

While all languages change, those that are endangered can do so in ways that are particularly rapid and profound. Amanda works to describe the kinds of grammatical changes that minority languages undergo when they are in intense contact with larger, more socially-dominant languages. She has been collaborating with speakers of Mudburra, a language of the central Northern Territory in Australia, since 2016, and she bases most of her investigations on the wealth of data that this partnership affords.

Amanda is interested in the practical as well as the theoretical implications of her research. In addition to authoring works for academic journals and conferences, she has helped create language resources for the Mudburra community such as storybooks, posters, and videos. She also co-authored the 2019 Mudburra to English Dictionary and co-designed a series of workshops for educators on how to incorporate this dictionary in the local school curriculum.

 

Daniel Midgley

Daniel Midgley is a linguist, educator, and science communicator. He has taught thousands of students over his career at UWA and Edith Cowan University, and thousands more through his media outreach. He has designed and taught first- and second-year units in Linguistics and in Education, where he delivered the Educational Linguistics unit. He received accolades for his teaching in 2007, when he was awarded a High Commendation in the UWA Excellence in Teaching Award. He frequently conducts classes in Linguistics for community members.

His academic work is in computational linguistics, where he publishes in speech act theory, machine learning, pragmatics, conversational analysis, and human interaction and technology.

Daniel has extensive media experience. He was host of the linguistics podcast Talk the Talk which aired on RTRFM community radio for ten years, and is currently host of the Because Language podcast. He's also the voice of the Speakeasy on ABC Radio Perth 720, which airs on Thursday mornings at 6.50am. 

 

Emily Gilchrist

Emily Gilchrist joins the Language Lab as a Research Assistant for the Google-funded “Aboriginal English Voices” project, directed by Glenys Collard and A/Prof Celeste Rodriguez Louro.

Emily completed a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) at UWA in 2022, majoring in Linguistics and French. During her studies, Emily developed an interest in language change and variation, First Nations languages and dialects, and Applied Linguistics. Her interest in language education was furthered by a WILG internship with the Department of Education in 2021.

Since graduating, Emily has spent time at Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring and the Kimberley Language Resource Centre, where she helped to prepare the centres’ archival materials for digitisation at the Digitisation Centre of WA. Questions arising from this work prompted her present enrolment in a Graduate Diploma in Archives and Records Management at Curtin University. She hopes this will strengthen her understanding of culturally responsive and sustainable ways of managing linguistic data, especially in a digital environment..

 

Edie Maher

Language specialist Edie Maher works at Bundiyarra – Irra Wangga Language Centre. She has supported languages in the region for more than 20 years as a Wajarri language teacher. As a part of Edie’s role at Bundiyarra, she helps families by researching family connections and helps build their family tree. She also focuses on developing educational language resources and materials.

Edie is a Nyungar, Palyku and Nyiybarli woman and grew up on Wajarri country in the Murchison area. She attended Tardun Station Mission and then school in South Fremantle, before attending Curtin University where she received her Bachelor of Education degree. Edie’s goal at Bundiyarra is to help maintain the nine languages and to support the language teachers using the languages.

 

Rosie Sitorus

Rosie Sitorus is a linguist with 11 years of experience working with languages in the Midwest, Gascoyne, and Pilbara regions of Western Australia (WA).  

She has worked in various roles at the Bundiyarra - Irra Wangga Language Centre, first as a linguist, then as a consultant, and finally as manager. She has worked mostly on Wajarri, Badimaya, and Thiinma/Warriyangga languages, although she has also engaged with Malgana, Nhanda, Yinggarda, and Ngarlawangga.

Currently, Rosie is the language program specialist at the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura Peoples Aboriginal Corporation (PKKPAC), where she incorporates her linguistic, strategic, management, and coordination experience into a new role of establishing a PKKP languages program, one of only a few Prescribed Body Corporate (PBC)-based language programs in WA.

Rosie is also an artist – a musician, poet, and storyteller. Since 2019, she has worked with Thiinma Elder Mr Peter Salmon on a songwriting project, 'Warralgurniya.' Rosie has travelled across WA with Mr Salmon and his band, performing songs written in Thiinma language.

 

Madeleine Clews

Born in Canada, Madeleine Clews completed her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) at the University of Saskatchewan in 1983 where she focused on Old English, Middle English, Old Norse and the History of English under the tutelage of Professor Richard Harris. She completed a D.Phil. qualifying year at Linacre College Oxford in 1984, mentored by Vigfússon Reader in Norse Antiquities Ursula Dronke, before taking a gap year to travel to Australia.

The ‘gap’ ended up lasting for nearly 30 years, during which Madeleine forged a career working as journalist for ABC and eventually spent more than a decade managing corporate communications for various state Government agencies. She left the public service to return to academia in 2015 and is now a PhD candidate in Linguistics at UWA. Her main interest is historical sociolinguistics, with a particular focus on English in Western Australia. She is currently exploring state colonial records for evidence of early dialect formation in the context of ‘history from below’.

  

Lucia Fraiese

Lucía, born and raised in Argentina, comes from an Applied Linguistics and teaching background. Since completing a Bachelor’s in English Language Teaching and Linguistics in Argentina, she has taught English and Spanish to students of all levels and diverse linguistic backgrounds in secondary and tertiary institutions around Argentina, the USA, and Australia.

In 2016-2017 she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to continue her professional development in the USA. She joined UWA in 2021 as an HDR prelim student. During this time, she investigated discourse-pragmatic variation in Australian English and Aboriginal English.

Lucía is currently a fully funded international PhD student in Linguistics at UWA. Her research explores how First Nations teens use language to create, contest, and maintain bonds in the boarding school. She is interested in how individuals form social styles and social identities through language. Lucía also currently works as a tutor and research assistant for UWA Linguistics and the Language Lab, and is the current Board of Graduate Research student representative.

 

Alex Stephenson

Alex Stephenson is a PhD candidate whose research explores post-digitisation socialisation processes for the storage, management, and dissemination of heritage language collections held in language centre archives across Western Australia. His current research is inter-disciplinary, sitting in the cross-section between Linguistics and Archaeology. His previous research focused on a typological investigation of reflexive expressions having lexicalised an emotional meaning in a sample of languages across Europe, Australia, and Asia.

Alex has previously worked with the Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring Language and Culture Centre in Kununurra, the Goldfields Aboriginal Language Centre in Kalgoorlie, and the Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre in Port Hedland.

 

 

Katharina Froedrich

Katharina Froedrich is an international PhD student in Linguistics and a Forrest Research Foundation doctoral scholar.

Katharina holds a Bachelor and Master of Arts degree in English Linguistics from the University of Munich (LMU), and has a strong background in sociolinguistics, language contact, and pidgin and creole studies.

At UWA, her PhD explores Aboriginal English spoken in the Pilbara using participatory research methods. Her research also investigates how First Nations people and communities use AI-operated technology for a more inclusive and socially just world. Katharina is currently a member of the Social Committee at Forrest Hall and a member of the GRS HDR Student Consultative Committee at UWA.