Biography
Dr. David Bowie (yes, that actually is his real name) is a sociolinguist and dialectologist
who grew up in Southern Maryland, where fried green tomatoes are an ordinary food
rather than just the name of a movie, and people are as likely to use “coke” as a
generic term for a soft drink as they are to call it anything else. He bounced around
from college to college as an undergraduate, picking up an associate’s degree from
Prince George's Community College along the way, until he fell in love with (and got
a bachelor's degree in) linguistics from the University of Maryland College Park.
He then received a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, where he focused
on the quantitative modeling of linguistic behavior. After that he held faculty positions
at Brigham Young University and the University of Central Florida, and came to the
University of Alaska Anchorage in 2009, where he now holds the rank of professor.
His early research compared the way people perceive and produce language, though he’s
since drifted into looking at issues like the connection between language and aging,
and the ways individuals express their social identities (particularly religious affiliation)
through language. He has also conducted some research on English as it’s spoken in
Alaska, because there hasn’t been very much serious work on that yet (which makes
Alaska the last frontier for linguistics, as well). He also serves as the faculty
advisor and co-editor for Understory, the Department of English’s annual anthology of student excellence.
