I joined the university in 2006 as Chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology & Social Work.  Prior to coming to TTU, I'd held appointments at the University of Sydney, Vanderbilt University, and Cleveland State University, where I had served as department chair for ten years.  I transitioned to the Office of the Dean in the College of Arts & Sciences where I served as Associate Dean of Finance and later as Interim Dean.  I currently enjoy holding a purely faculty appointment where I can teach, engage in research, and pursue service to the disciplines of anthropology and linguistics as well to larger, allied constituents.  

My fieldwork has been in several countries, mostly in the West Indies and in Papua New Guinea.  I've worked with the descendants of early European colonization in the West Indies since the early 1980s and published articles and book chapters on the sociolinguistic history of Euro-West Indian English -- a set of koínéized varieties that developed out of early identity formation among indentured servants and others who were transported to the region in the middle of the seventeenth century.

In Papua New Guinea, I worked in the upper Sepik River basin near the confluence of the Karawari and Arafundi Rivers.  I have documented theindigenous trade languages of that area, and still have more documentation to complete.  I have also been interested in the Arafundian languages -- a small grouping within the larger conglomerate of Papuan languages spoken on the island.  

Most recently I have been engaged in research on the 'aesthetic properties of grammar' that are frequently manifested in alliterative reduplication, echo word morphology, expressives, and other such exponents.  I editeda book entitled The Aesthetics of Grammar:  Sound and Meaning in the Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia that appeared in 2013 with Cambridge. In August of 2020, I published another edited volume on expressives in the South Asian linguistic landscape (Routledge 2021).  

I have been one of four co-editors of two volumes published by Cambridge University Press on the lesser-known varieties of English. The first volume appeared in 2010 and the second volume appeared in April of 2015.  My first edited book (lead editor was Michael Aceto) was oncontact Englishes of the Eastern Caribbean (Contact Englishes of the Eastern Caribbean, John Benjamins, 2003).  

Presently, I have several major projects in the works.  I am editing a collection of papers on expressives in the languages of Europe publication by Cambridge University Press.    I expect the book to be released late in 2022.  Another project is a sole-authored monograph on expressivity for the series Key Topics in Syntax published by Cambridge University Press.  I am also editing a volume for Oxford University Press, entitled Capturing Expressivity:  Methods, Techniques, and Contexts.  This volume brings together a group of the world's authorities on working on expressivity, allowing them to discuss how to engage in this area of grammar.  Lastly, I am authoring a textbook on cultural anthropology for Springer Nature, which should be due out in 2023.