It’s been my privilege to collaborate with and advise these students:
As PhD chair
- Annan Kirk. in progress.
- Monica Nesbitt. PhD 2019. Changing Their Minds: The Impact of Internal Social change on Local Phonology. Monica was a post-doctoral fellow at Dartmouth College until 2019-2021. She is now an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Indiana University.
- Mingzhe Zheng. PhD 2018. To Be Assimilated and More Like White: A Sociolinguistic Study of Chinese-Americans in the “Asian city” of Southeast Michigan. A former post-doctoral Fellow in Chinese at Earlham College, Indiana, and Lecturer in Chinese at University of California Berkeley, Mingzhe is currently an Assistant Professor of Chinese at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA.
- Ashley Hesson. PhD 2014. Medically Speaking: Co-variation as Stylistic Clustering Within Physician Recommendations. Ashley simultaneously earned her MD at Michigan State, and she is currently an Assistant Professor of maternal fetal medicine at the University of Michigan.
- Daniel Hasty. PhD 2012. This Might Could Help Us Better Understand Syntactic Variation: The Double Modal Construction in Tennessee English. Daniel combined corpus and matched guise technique methods to investigate the use of and attitudes toward double modals such as might could and may can. He is currently Professor of Linguistics at Coastal Carolina University, South Carolina.
As PhD co-chair
- Mofart Ayiega. in progress. (with Deo Ngonyani).
- Mohammed Ruthan. PhD 2020. (with Yen-Hwei Lin). Aspects of Jazani Arabic. Mohammed is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia.
- Xiaomei Wang. PhD 2019. (with Yen-Hwei Lin). Variation and Change in Tianjin Tone Sandhi. Xiaomei is a lecturer at Tianjin University, China.
- Irina Zaykovskaya. PhD 2019. (with Susan Gass). Perceptions of Vernacular US English LIKE by Native and Non-native English-speaking Young Adults in Michigan. Irina is a Lecturer in Russian in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic, and Dutch at the University of Minnesota.
As MA chair or co-chair
- Emily Duggan. MA 2025. Lesbian vs Dyke: An Examination of the Differences in Social Meaning Between Two Queer Identity Terms.
- Xiayiamaierdan Abudushalamu. MA 2023. Chinese Governmental Censorship and its Influence on Uyghur People’s Language Use in an Online Show.
- Monica Obiri-Yeboah. MA 2022, by exam.
- Arlo Kaczor. MA 2022, by exam.
- Rebecca Senn. MA 2020, by exam.
- Carli Hearn-Willard. MA 2020, by exam.
- Morgan Momberg. MA 2020, by exam.
- Alexander Mason. MA 2016, by exam.
- Chun-Yi Peng. MA 2011. The Placement of the Prepositional Dative in Mandarin Varieties.
- Lubna Aljuboori. MA 2009, by exam.
- Kirsten Bakken. MA 2008, by exam.
As chair, doctoral qualifying papers
- 2025. Annan Kirk. Adjectival intensifiers in Michigan English.
- 2025. Mofart Ayiega. Morphological non-agreement on animate nouns in Swahili.
- 2021. Xiayimaierdan Abudushalamu. Uyghur-Chinese Mandarin code-Switching and government censorship in an online show.
- 2019. Chad Hall. Uncovering a focused Lebanese American English ethnolect in Dearborn, Michigan.
- 2019. Alex Mason. The effect of age and gender on the perception of vocalic outliers.
- 2018. Mohammed Ruthan. Attitudes towards Saudi Arabic Jazani dialect.
- 2017. Monica Nesbitt. The social life of TRAP in Lansing.
- 2017. Matt Savage. Attitudinal responses to two NCS vowels among Inland North speakers.
- 2016. Sayako Uehara. The effect of outliers on perception of a vowel undergoing change.
- 2016. Chenchen Xu. The sociolinguistic meanings of syllable contraction in Chinese: Region, gender and stereotypes.
- 2016. Madeline Shellgren. An exploration of the effect of personality on listener perceptions.
- 2015. Xiaomei Wang. A sociolinguistic study of Tianjin tone sandhi.
- 2015. Mingzhe Zheng. Chinese American accommodation to the Northern Cities Shift in Southeast Michigan.
- 2015. Kali Bybel. ‘Maybe I shoulda went to work today’: Participle Leveling in American English.
- 2013. Qian Luo. On the role of social factors in tone merger in Guangzhou Cantonese.
- 2013. Ashley Hesson. Doctor’s orders: A study of mandative adjective extraposition in physician speech.
- 2010. Daniel Hasty. Yeah, I might would say that: A sociolinguistic study of double modal acceptance in the Mid-South.
Other graduate student collaborators
- Kali Morris (née) Bybel. PhD 2018. Kali is a syntactician who wrote her dissertation on defaults. But she maintained an interest in sociolinguistic variation, writing a qualifying paper on a Twitter corpus study of participle leveling, and publishing two papers with me on corpus analyses of general extenders, including one in Language in Society (Wagner, Hesson, Bybel and Little 2012).
- Sayako Uehara. PhD 2018. Saya is a phonologist whose dissertation addressed word segmentation cues. She also wrote a qualifying paper on the perception of vocalic outliers in sound change, which we expanded for an NWAV paper (Uehara and Wagner 2018).
Doctoral committees, by graduation year
- forthcoming Adam Barnhardt, Jessica Shepherd, Connor Bechler, Mofart Ayiega, Johanna Mechler (University of Duisburg-Essen).
- 2025 Yunting Gu, Yongqing Ye
- 2024 Shannon Cousins
- 2023 Naiyan Du, Ye Ma, Elena Sheard (Australia National University).
- 2020 Chenchen Xu, Ho-Hsin Huang.
- 2019 Drew Trotter, Adam Gobeski
- 2018 Kali Morris (Bybel), Qian Luo, Sayako Uehara
- 2016 Joe Jalbert
- 2015 Candice Scott (University of Michigan)
- 2014 Greg Johnson
- 2010 Mousa Qasem