Professional Bio

Ariana Steele (they/them) is an Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. As an interdisciplinary scholar, they use quantitative and qualitative methods spanning the disciplines of sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, linguistic anthropology, and more to look at the relationships between identity work, sociolinguistic meaning, and power amongst queer and trans people of color. Their research interests are broad but have recently explored the impacts of normativities, hegemony, and intersecting structural oppressions on the ways in which multiply marginalized individuals navigate various sociolinguistic landscapes to construct identities beyond binaries and categorization. For their dissertation work, they received an Abolition & Freedom Dreams fellowship from the Society of Fellows as well as a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation. Their research has appeared or is forthcoming in Gender and Language as well as in edited collections on language, gender, and sexuality.

Selected Recent Articles and Book Chapters

Steele, A. (2022). Enacting new worlds of gender: Nonbinary speakers, racialized gender, and anti-colonialism. In K. Hall & R. Barrett (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.