Kevin B McGowan

(University of Kentucky)

Biography

Kevin McGowan is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Kentucky where he is also Director of the Phonetics Lab, a member of the Lewis Honors faculty, and Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Linguistics. His primary research interests are in phonetics and speech perception with a particular interest in listeners’ use, in both perception and production, of informative patterns of variation. Although not a sociophonetician in the traditional sense, McGowan’s interest in the informativeness of variation often raises social questions alongside coarticulatory questions and matters related to the listener’s role in sound change. He is coauthor, with Rusty Barrett and Jennifer Cramer, of the third edition of Rosina Lippi-Green’s landmark text, English with an Accent and is currently preparing a 4th edition of this book. He has had the honor of teaching courses at 3 Linguistic Institutes (2013, 2017, and co-teaching in 2019 with Pam Beddor) and has benefited tremendously from connections made, and feedback received, at annual meetings. McGowan teaches courses in phonetics; speech perception; syntax; computational linguistics; language discrimination; and the intersection of speech perception, third wave sociolinguistics, and puppetry. As DGS, McGowan has overseen the launch of a new doctoral program at the University of Kentucky which is currently in the process of admitting its second cohort.

Statement

I am shocked to be nominated to this committee. But I would like to participate in the work of the LSA EC because I believe that our association, in all of its various endeavors, is essential to the continued health and advancement of linguistics. We have entered a period of disruption and uncertainty in higher education in the United States and I believe now, in particular, it is important for people with the unearned privileges of race, gender, sexuality, first language, and standard-like accent to use those privileges to make room for more marginalized people. I believe it is important that the difficult work of equity and inclusion not fall exclusively on the shoulders of people who are seen as bringing diversity or whose lived experiences include systematic inequity and exclusion. There was a common thread through the statements of Savithry Namboodiripad, Jessi Grieser, and Eric Baković in their 2024 EC nomination statements related to the need for the LSA to “welcome a big table” as Grieser put it, to, in Namboodiripad’s words “be a source of support to scholars who experience harm or are otherwise minoritized in academic or academic-adjacent spaces” or, as Baković frankly puts it, we face a decline in participation and membership which threatens the continued existence of the society if we can’t, as a society and as a discipline, figure out how to be a space where vulnerable people feel welcome and safe. I believe in these precarious times that academic societies like ours have a crucial role to play in pushing back, vocally and visibly, against efforts to undermine and discourage minoritized members of our community and to lead by continuing to do the difficult, democratic work of transforming our society into one that leads by example.