We would like to welcome new faculty members for whom this Fall is their first semester. Let's meet these new additions to the department!
Take a look below to find out more about these exciting new faculty members:
Karina Tachihara
Assistant Professor
My research explores how adults learn language by focusing on the cognitive mechanisms that enable, enhance, and disrupt the process of learning. I investigate how mechanisms that help us learn which constructions are acceptable and which are unacceptable may work differently for adults learning a new language, making learning what not to say particularly difficult. I am also interested in how semantic knowledge shapes the organization of production. I use a combination of psycholinguistic tasks measuring acceptability, comprehension, production, and memory as well as computational tools such as machine learning and large language models to better understand how we learn and use language.
I have worked in English, Spanish, and Japanese in the past, but I hope to expand to more languages in the future. I also speak Portuguese and am interested in learning Hindi next.This fall, I will be teaching Ling 225: Language, Mind, and Brain.
Kevin Wamalwa
Lecturer, Director of Swahili
Kevin Wamalwa is a cultural anthropologist and scholar of African cultural studies. Kevin studies resource-based conflict and post-violence memory in Africa and examines how people cope with traumatic experiences in ways that are particular to their sociocultural settings. His research examines embodied memories of sociopolitical, ethnic, and recourse-related conflict in Mt. Elgon, Kenya. His work highlights how small-scale conflicts and those that involve marginalized communities provide a vantage point to understanding people’s agency in how they remember and talk about trauma, reconcile, and heal without state mediation. Kevin is also a passionate Swahili poet, educator, translator, and Swahili scholar. This Fall, Kevin is teaching Swahili language courses on campus.
Tatiana Kashina
Lecturer
My name is Tatiana Kashina, and I hold a Master of Arts in Teaching English as a Second Language (MATESL) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am passionate about facilitating English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) instruction. My teaching experience spans ESL Composition and Conversation classes, EFL courses, as well as Russian (both as a foreign and native language) and French. I enjoy teaching languages because I find it rewarding to see students apply the skills they develop to real-life tasks. My academic interests include second language acquisition, language assessments, second language writing, and translanguaging. This semester, I will be primarily teaching ESL composition courses.
Rebecca Shaw Sullivan
Lecturer
Rebecca Shaw Sullivan has been teaching English as a Second Language since 2019, when she graduated from the University of Illinois MATESL program. She has worked with students from all walks of life at Harrisburg Area Community College, International Language Academy of Washington D.C., and Southern Illinois University. She is passionate about educational technology, gamification of language learning, and decentering the teacher in the ESL classroom. Her current research focuses on the incorporation of diverse dialects in ESL education, along with student and teacher perceptions of these dialects. In her free time, Becca enjoys gardening, playing the piano, and reading whatever she can get her hands on
Becca is currently teaching ESL 110/510 (English Pronunciation & Oral Fluency) and ESL 511 (Written & Oral Communication).
Dorothy Maweu
Lecturer
Dorothy Maweu is a new lecturer in the English as a Second Language (ESL) Department of Linguistics. She holds a Bachelor of Education (Arts) degree from the University of Nairobi, Kenya, and an MA in Teaching English as a Second Language from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She began her teaching career as a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, and has since taught English at various institutions in Kenya and the United States. At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she taught extensively in Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL), the Intensive English Institute (IEI), and ESL. As a TA, she was recognized as the best TA in Non-Western Languages in 2024 and received excellent ratings from her students. She is currently teaching ESL 521, Written and Oral Business Communication. Her interests include language pedagogy, pedagogical code-switching, teacher stylization, and World Englishes. In her new role, she is committed to providing elevated learning experiences through the integration of theory and practice
Scott Nelson
Instructor
I am a phonologist interested in broad topics such as phonological representation, the formal relationship between phonological and phonetic knowledge, and the computational expressivity of phonological generalizations. I received a BA and MA from Michigan State University and during that time I largely took an experimental approach in trying to understand how top-down (phonological) information was integrated during speech perception. I am currently finishing my PhD at Stony Brook University where my research has focused primarily on computational characterizations of the phonetics-phonology interface. My dissertation is titled The Computational Structure of Phonological and Phonetic Knowledge. I am teaching LING401 (phonetics) and LING542 (Phonology II) this fall and am excited to be here at UIUC and continue to get to know the faculty, staff, and students in the department!
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