Dr. Tracey Weldon (American Dialect Society Professor)
University of South Carolina
Dr. Tracey L. Weldon is a Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of South Carolina, where she currently serves as Senior Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Faculty Development in the College of Arts and Sciences. As a quantitative sociolinguist specializing in African American language varieties, Weldon has taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in Linguistics, including African American English, Language and Gender, Survey of Linguistics, and Varieties of American English. She has published many scholarly articles and book chapters, including papers in American Speech, the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language Variation and Change, and Language. And she has given numerous conference presentations and invited talks, including recent keynote addresses for the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV), and the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL). Weldon is an Associate Producer of the Emmy award-winning NSF funded documentary “Talking Black in America,” which was released in 2017 by the Language & Life Project at North Carolina State University. She is the author of Middle Class African American English, published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. And she serves as an Executive Editor and Advisory Board member of the forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of African American English.