Haley Faith Patterson

Biography

Dr. Haley Patterson is a Spanish sociolinguist whose primary research interest is language change, particularly at the morphosyntactic level, and its impact on language processing. She uses interdisciplinary, intersectional frameworks to study the relationship between language, gender and sexuality in U.S. Spanish-speaking communities. Haley has been a Spanish instructor at the collegiate level since 2017, when she began at the University of New Mexico, earning a Master's degree in Hispanic Linguistics. She graduated with a PhD from the University of Houston in May of 2023, producing a dissertation titled "El lenguaje inclusivo: Tendencias sociolingüísticas y ramificaciones cognitivas" (Inclusive Language: Sociolinguistic Tendencies and Cognitive Ramifications). Haley has published research on morphosyntactic innovation in contact varieties of Spanish in both domestic and international peer-reviewed journals and was recently voted onto the MLA's Executive Committee on Language Change. She is excited to start Fall 2023 as Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at St. Mary's College of Maryland, the National Public Honors College.