Current Members

Alex Adney is a senior at the University of Texas at Austin studying economics while also minoring in Business and getting his Certificate in German. He is from Austin and has spent most of his life here, however he has a little bit of a background in German as he has lived in Germany for four years when he was a kid. His interest and appreciation for Texas German can really be credited to Professor Boas as his class has opened Alex’s eyes and really intrigued him to try to get involved. Alex thinks being a part of the TGDP would be an incredible way to not only maintain and improve his German speaking but also be a part of an amazing Project.

 

Marisol developed an interest for languages and storytelling at a young age. They grew up in a bilingual household and sought to learn a third language in college. They completed a BA in German at the University of Florida and went on to complete an MA and PhD with the Germanic Studies Department at UT Austin. They specialized in twenty-first century German literature and film and developed ample experience in language teaching and editorial work. They enjoy learning to read Japanese in their spare time.

Their work doing interviews, transcription, and documentation for the TGDP is both fun and meaningful. It gives them the opportunity to not only learn more about German dialects and the history of Germany-US migration, but also to honor family histories, memories, and cultural identities in Texas German communities.

 

Margo Blevins, the previous Graduate Research Assistant (i.e., Project Manager) for the Texas German Dialect Project, completed her PhD in August 2022. Her dissertation, titled The language-tagging & orthographic normalization of spoken mixed-language data, with a focus on Texas German, proposes ways to streamline the annotation of Texas German transcripts to make them more usable for researchers. 

Margo was first introduced to the TGDP in 2012 when she took Hans Boas’ course on Texas German at UT Austin and went on a trip to Wall, Texas to conduct interviews. She has been working with the TGDP since 2016, either as the Project Manager, or as more general support. For the next year, she will continue working with the TGDP as a postdoc and she looks forward to making significant headway on several of TGDP projects.

 

Hans is the Raymond Dickson, Alton C. Allen, and Dillon Anderson Centennial Professor for Germanic Linguistics at UT. His areas of interest include documentation and preservation of endangered languages and dialects, computational lexicography, syntax, lexical semantics, and contrastive linguistics. He became interested in Texas German after hearing it spoken for the first time on a trip through Fredericksburg. A native of Göttingen, Germany, Hans enjoys cooking, traveling, playing the piano, hiking, and country western dancing.

hcb@mail.utexas.edu

http://hcb.gmc.utexas.edu

Damir is Associate Professor for Computational Linguistics at Indiana University. His areas of interest include speech and language technologies for documentation and preservation of low-resourced and endangered languages and dialects, deep natural language processing, computational semantics and pragmatics. His interest in Texas German grew over the years while traveling through Texas, visiting the colleagues at UT, and becoming intrigued by the project goals and activities in the TGDP. Damir grew up in Dortmund, Germany, and enjoys Texas BBQ, as well as traveling, meeting people, nature, and music.

dcavar@iu.edu

http://damir.cavar.me

Bryce is a freshman history major from Houston, Texas. He first became familiar with the Texas-German Dialect Project while studying for the Texas State German Contest in high school, and was interested in how it combined two of his biggest interests: Texas History and the German language. He looks forward to continuing to explore the connection between the two.

 

Allison is a third-year history major pursuing certificates in German and museum studies. She found out about TGDP through her German professor and was immediately interested in both the educational and archiving aspects of the project. She hopes to learn more about how Texas Germans historically interacted with African American and Indigenous communities of Texas. 

Glenn Gilbert joined the TGDP in 2017 as an advisor to the project. He wrote a pioneering dissertation on Texas German, graduating from Harvard in 1963. He was at UT Austin as an assistant professor from 1963-1970, and then moved to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where he worked until his retirement in 2005. Glenn laid the foundation for the study of Texas German, most notably with his well-known Linguistic Atlas of Texas German (UT Press, 1972), as well as numerous other books and papers. After he retired, he moved to Florida. We are incredibly lucky to have Glenn as an advisor to the TGDP.

Riley Greene is a junior at the University of Texas at Austin, pursuing a degree in German and European Studies. Her passion for German language, culture, and history was ignited by a transformative exchange program in Germany and Austria during her high school years. Living with a host family, she immersed herself in the German/Austrian way of life, fostering a deep appreciation for their rich heritage.

With a strong desire to continue her academic journey, Riley aspires to pursue a master’s degree and ultimately embark on a career as a German language instructor. She is eager to gain practical experience working with German speakers through the TGDP and is excited to be expanding her knowledge and skills in the field.

 

Heidi is a senior who is originally from Colorado, but has lived in Texas and Belgium as well. She is majoring in Linguistics and getting a certificate in German as well. Heidi grew up in German and Flemish household due to her dad and his side of the family originally being from Germany. Because of that, Heidi has always had an interest in the Germanic languages, and languages in general. This interest was the deciding factor for Heidi to join the TGDP, because the Texas German dialect is such an interesting piece of Texas and German history for her and she wanted to learn more about it. She plans to participate in the Würzburg Summer Program to get a better grasp of the German language and culture, as well as to make sure she is on a better path to go into the field of translation once she completes her degree through UT.

 

Lars Hinrichs is an Associate Professor in English Language and Linguistics at UT Austin. His research focuses on issues of language diversity and migration, especially where different varieties of English are involved. Having become interested in speakers of Texas German on a field trip to Doss in 2006, he is now researching the substrate influences on the English of Texas Germans.

https://www.larshinrichs.site/

Ellen Jones got her PhD from the Germanic Studies at UT Austin in 2025. She joined the project in January 2020 as an additional Graduate Research Assistant. Coming to Austin from Vermont, she completed her undergraduate studies in Linguistics and German at the University of Vermont, and was the Outstanding German Senior in 2019. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, dialectology, language teaching pedagogy, and language use in media. She spent a gap year living in Rhauderfehn, Germany through the American Field Service exchange program. While unfamiliar with Texas German, Ellen’s interest in dialects stems from her time in Rhauderfehn living with a family who partially speaks Low German at home.

James Kearney holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Germanic Studies at UT Austin, is a Assistant Professor of Instruction at UT Austin, taught German for many years at Katy High School, and has been a longtime student of the history of the German settlements in Texas.

Dr. Kearney has written several award-winning books and articles about Texas German history and European immigration to Texas in the 19th century. He has also taught several classes at UT Austin, including a class on European immigration (Fall 2013) and the UGS 303 Signature Class “The Texas German Experience” (Fall 2022).

https://jamesckearney.com

james.kearney@austin.utexas.edu

Dayon Ketchens is a master’s student at The University of Texas at Austin within the Germanic Studies department. He grew up in a multicultural city which led to his interest in language and the influence of language on the perception of people. Dayon first encountered German in middle school, where he began to learn the language. After graduating high school Dayon went on to get his BA in German Language and Culture, and Linguistics from the University of Pittsburgh. During his time at the university, Dayon spent a semester abroad in Heidelberg, Germany. While in Heidelberg he studied directly at the Heidelberg University and did an internship at the Mark Twain Center – a museum for transatlantic relations between the United States and Germany. Through his time abroad, Dayon gained interest in bridging the gaps between cultures and languages. This interest spread into his studies and ultimately led him to want to seek a position within the TGDP.

Nikon Kovalev (she/they) is a scholar, translator, poet, and graduate student at UT Austin in Comparative Literature. They received their BA in Economics in 2011 and a MA in philology in 2013 from the South Federal University (Rostov-on-Don, Russia). From 2014 to 2020, they worked as an editor of the poetry magazine Prosodia. Their reviews, essays, and poems have been published in Benn-Forum, Greza, ROAR, Vozdukh, Novy mir, Voprosy literature, and elsewhere. They have translated German, French and English poems and novels into Russian. In 2017, they earned their Ph.D. at the Institute of World Literature. Their dissertation topic was the Baroque influence in the works of Gottfried Benn. Until 2023, they worked there as a senior researcher. In 2018-2019, they were a lecturer at the Russian State University for the Humanities and the Higher School of Economics. In July 2022, they emigrated from Russia because of their stand against the unjustified invasion of Ukraine and their queer identity. In July-August 2022 they received a fellowship at the German Literature Archive (Marbach). They are currently a Researcher at the Department of Germanic Studies at UT Austin. In March 2023, they organized a seminar at the ACLA conference on Totalitarianism in Russia and Germany. Their research interests include 17th-21st Century German Literature, Russian Literature, Comparative Literature, and Gender Studies.

Marc is an associate professor of Germanic linguistics at UT Austin. His research focuses on historical linguistics, phonology, and the history of linguistics. He first became interested in Texas German during a stint as a visiting assistant professor at UT in 2005-06, and is looking forward to investigating it more intensively. He plans to focus on the history and phonology of Texas German.

Karen Roesch is an Assistant Professor of German at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. She is also the Hoyt-Reichmann Scholar of German-American Studies and the Director of the Max Kade German-American Research and Resource Center. Karen received her Ph.D. in Germanic Linguistics at UT in 2009 with special areas of interest in Texas German, Low Alemannic, and foreign language pedagogy. Her dissertation on Texas Alsatian served as the basis for her 2012 book with John Benjamins (Language maintenance and language death: The decline of Texas Alsatian). She has a Masters in Curriculum and Teaching from Michigan State University and has taught German, French, English, and Japanese abroad in Australia, Germany, and Japan, as well as in New York and Texas. She is a native Texan and became interested in Texas German several years ago through her High School German teacher from the German community of Doss. In 2000, she moved to Doss and taught German in the Fredericksburg High and Middle Schools before returning to UT. Before starting her job at IUPUI, Karen taught as a lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin and Texas State University in San Marcos.

Drew Saunders is a senior Genetics and German major at the University of Texas at Austin. They are from Austin, Texas, and many of their relatives are Texas Germans. They learned German as a child from their mother and began teaching German at the German Texas Heritage Society in high school. They have proctored for the Texas State German contest and learned of the project after taking a class with Dr. Boas. Texas German is one of their passions and they are looking forward to helping in preserving the language.

Joren Somers studied English, German, Dutch and Icelandic at Ghent University, the University of Kent and the University of Iceland. After a short career in teaching, he obtained a PhD from Ghent University on alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat verbs in German and Icelandic. As of September 2024, he has been employed as a Francqui Fellow of the Belgian American Educational Foundation at the University of Texas at Austin. His research is focused on non-canonical subjecthood in German, Icelandic and Dutch.

 

Caden is a third-year psychology major pursuing a minor in history and a certificate in German. Born and raised in Frisco, he has lived in Texas his whole life and has no plans of leaving. It is because of his interest in German and history alongside his native Texan experience that the Texas German Dialect Program was a great fit.

 

Jana is a historian and DAAD Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.  With a focus on U.S. and transatlantic history, her research interests include 19^th and 20^th century immigration, knowledge, and religious history as well as the history of racism.  Currently, she is working on her second book titled “The Lager Beer Revolution in the United States: The History of Beer and German-Americans as a Reinvention of Ethnicity, Knowledge, and Consumption”. She analyses the technological and cultural transfer of the “German art of brewing” to the United States, covering the beginning of the 19^th century, when German-style, bottom-fermented beers were first introduced until national prohibition in 1920.