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.

 

Elisabeth is a second-year government major pursuing a minor in urban studies. She became interested in the Texas German Dialect Project during the UGS course “The Texas German Experience.” Elisabeth pursued opportunities with TGDP because of her passion for history and connection to her ancestry.

 

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

Kaplan Brady is a junior at the University of Texas at Austin, pursuing a degree in Accounting and German with a minor in International Business. Born and raised in Frisco, Texas, her passion for German language and culture was sparked when an exchange student from Germany came to study at her high school. From there, she developed a deep appreciation for German language and culture. 

Kaplan learned about the TGDP from one of her German professors, Professor Ries, who encouraged her to get involved. She hopes to continue to learn and grow in learning the German language along with helping to preserve the Texas German dialect.

 

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.

 

Hi! My name is Jose Cruz, and I am currently an undergraduate at UT Austin pursuing a double major. One in Architectural Engineering, and one in German (fingers-crossed). I was initially introduced and fell in love with the German language during an exchange year abroad with the Congress Bundestag Youth Exchange (CBYX) program. I had wanted to take a gap year after high school and chose Germany after being fascinated by its rich culture and history. Here, I assimilated into German life and a host family for 10 months. I quickly picked up the language and worked hard towards fluency by studying it. Moreover, I developed interpersonal connections with my host family, community, and other exchange students. I built a broad support system and additionally learned a little more about what engineering in Germany looked like.

Thus, today, with a deep love for math, creativity, German, and knowledge, I ended up at UT Austin. At UT, I aspire to engage in a future where I can combine my different passions. Shortly thereafter, I discovered the TGDP within the German department. As a Texas native, I was intrigued to come back to my home and simultaneously be able to immediately involve myself with something I had grown to love. At TGDP, I aspire to revitalize and preserve integral parts of Texas and German history within.

 

Damian del Bosque is an undergraduate student at UT Austin. He is a third-year economics and German major. He was born in Monterrey, Mexico, and was taught German from the start of fourth grade, since German was obligatory in the elementary school he attended. Although it was not his decision to learn German, he immediately fell in love with it and kept learning it throughout middle school and high school. This is the reason why he is currently studying German at UT Austin. Furthermore, he is fascinated by Texas German. He is very excited to help preserve and extend the lifetime of Texas German culture and work with the TGDP team!

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.

Julia Haberland is a graduate research assistant for the TGDP. She is a second-year PhD student in the Germanic studies department at UT Austin. Her interests are in L2 speech perception and production, pronunciation teaching, and language pedagogy. Julia is from Germany and grew up in a small town near Frankfurt am Main. An exchange year in high school in the United States initially got her interested in other languages and cultures. After high school, Julia completed her undergraduate degree in Global Studies and graduate degree in Second Language Acquisition/TESOL at Missouri State University. As a Germany native, Julia was surprised to hear about a distinct German Dialect in Texas and is excited to now contribute to its preservation.

 

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/

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

MA in German and European Studies (Georgetown University), BA in Spanish and French with German Minor (Southwestern University)

Erin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Germanic Studies at UT Austin. She is a native Texan with German heritage, and finds the work of the TGDP an interesting way to connect her academic studies and family history. 

Utpal is pursuing his PhD in the Department of Germanic Studies at UT Austin. He completed his MA in Lexicography from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. His research interests lie at the intersection of Construction Grammar, Language Acquisition and Lexicography.

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.

Ellen Jones Schoedler completed her PhD in Germanic Studies at UT Austin in 2025. She initially joined the project in January 2021 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 in 2019. Her research focuses on speaker identity and community dynamics in relation to the maintenance and loss of minority/regional languages. She has written about both Texas German and a variety of Low German spoken in northwestern Germany.

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.