hello!

i’m a linguist studying queer and trans language. i’m a graduate student at uc santa barbara, where i’m a member of the trans research in linguistics lab (trill) under dr. lal zimman, and the computational psycholinguistics of listening and speaking (cpls) lab under dr. simon todd.

these are some things i do research on!

english second-person pronouns you guys and y’all
perceptions of gender, sexuality, and the voice
trans-affirming statistical/quantitative methods

you can read more about my research and teaching below.

i also do drag! not (currently) related to my research.

if you want to connect with me you can always shoot me an email, or i’m also trying out bluesky.

thanks for visiting my little page 👾💕

research

below are little blurbs and citations for my current/ongoing research projects! i’ve linked materials that are already publicly available online, but i am also (usually) happy to share slides if you send me an email. all of these projects are still developing, so i hope to have more to share as time goes on!

you guys and y’all

my (in progress) m.a. thesis work looks at attitudes towards the english second-person plural constructions you guys and y’all, and how these attitudes are impacted by ideologies about race, place, and gender. i’m especially interested in how metalinguistic discourse and sociopolitical ideologies shape language, and i think you guys and y’all are a great lens into these phenomena because they implicate many politicized issues around language, identity, and power (e.g. gender-inclusive language, lingusitic appropriation, and linguistic stigma).

this work has been presented at lavender languages (lavlang), the language interaction and social organization (liso) conference at ucsb, and the american anthropological association (aaa) annual meeting. i’ve also written a more informal piece about this work for the linguistic society of america (lsa)’s committee on lgbtq+[z] issues (cozil) 2024 pride month blog series.

2024	You guys, y'all, and queer and trans language [lsadc.org/af_membercommittee.asp?committeeid=14&sp=40]	Committee on LGBTQ+[Z] Issues in Linguistics (COZIL) Linguistic Society of America (LSA)
November 2023	Beyond third-person: Epistemologies of race, place, gender, and power in you guys and y'all Panel: Trans linguistic logics: Pronominal and grammatical epistemologies	2023 American Anthopological Association/Canadian Anthropology Society (AAA/CASCA) Annual Meeting Metro Toronto Convention Centre
April 2023	What do you guys and y'all tell us about inclusive language? Race, place, gender, and linguistic ownership in metalinguistic debates	The 26th Annual Conference on Language, Interaction, and Social Organization (LISO) UC Santa Barbara
March 2023	"Battle of the Pronouns" revisited: Metalinguistic discourses on you guys and y'all	Lavender Languages and Linguistics (LavLang) 29 Boise State University

perceptual sociophonetics

for my b.a. honors thesis, i ran an experiment looking at what acoustic properties of a person’s voice can contribute to making a person “sound gay.” while there has been extensive research in this area already, results across different studies are often inconsistent and difficult to replicate, suggesting that this phenomenon is highly variable and complex. to that end, more recently i’ve been interested in applying cognitive and computational models to this phenomenon, with the hopes that cognitively-informed models will offer more explanatory power. i’m especially interested in the role that variation in listener perception might play in this phenomenon.

i presented a poster and wrote a proceedings paper for the international congress of phonetic sciences (icphs), applying exemplar theory and modeling to this phenomenon. additionally, i have presented another analysis at the variation and language processing (valp) conference where i used heirarchical clustering to look at listener variation.

i also presented on this work as part of ucsb’s grad slam, which is a competition in which graduate students create three-minute public-facing presentations about their research. my talk was the runner-up in the humanities and fine arts division, and is available to watch online! (password: GradSlam2024)

June 2024	Variation and perception of queer speech: A hierarchical clustering approach	Variation and Language Processing (VALP) 6 Universidade de Vigo
March 2024	Runner-up - Grad Slam, Humanities & Fine Arts Division Presentation title: "Perception and Queer Speech: Beyond the 'Gay Accent'" [vimeo.com/924279645] (password: GradSlam2024)	Graduate Division UC Santa Barbara
2023	Towards a model of the listener in perception of queer speech [internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs-proceedings/ICPhS2023/full_papers/399.pdf]	Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS)

sex and gender in linguistics

this project is a larger collaboration that has included montreal benesch, kirby conrod, marina zhukova, and lal zimman, where we’re aiming to take a critical look at how linguists deal with sex/gender in their work. ultimately, we hope to be able to provide empirically and ethically-informed guidelines to help linguists approach sex and gender in ways that are affirming and accurate. one of my personal interests in this project is trans-affirming statistical and quantitative methods, as quantitative linguistics generally lags behind qualitative linguistics in its treatment of sex and gender.

so far, we have:

presented talks at the new ways of analyzing variation (nwav) conference in which we discuss two trans-affirming methods for operationalizing gender.
run a workshop at the linguistic society of america (lsa)’s annual meeting regarding best practices for asking sex/gender information from research participants, for which we produced materials that are available online.
conducted a survey of linguists (n=157 to date) asking about current norms and practices in the field for collecting sex/gender information. this survey was also presented at the lsa’s annual meeting, and we wrote a proceedings paper about the results.

and we have more in the works, so stay tuned!

2024	Current norms and best practices for collecting and representing sex/gender in linguistics: Towards ethical and inclusive methodologies Cooper Bedin, Montreal Benesch, Marina Zhukova, and Lal Zimman [doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v9i1.5668]	Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America (PLSA)
January 2024	Current best practices for asking about sex/gender in linguistic research Organized session Cooper Bedin, Montreal Benesch, Kirby Conrod, Marina Zhukova, and Lal Zimman [bit.ly/LSA2024GenderQuestionMaterials]	2024 Linguistic Society of American (LSA) Annual Meeting Sheraton New York Times Square
October 2023	Operationalizing gender: Implications of participant-driven measurements Montreal Benesch and Cooper Bedin	New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 51 Queens College & CUNY
October 2023	Operationalizing gender: Methods for statistical modeling of open-response demographic data Cooper Bedin, Lal Zimman, and Marina Zhukova	New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 51 Queens College & CUNY

teaching

at uc santa barbara

at ucsb i have held (or am scheduled to hold) teaching assistantship positions for introductory linguistics; language, gender, and sexuality; articulatory phonetics; foundations of computational linguistics; and advanced computational linguistics.

at uc berkeley

cs 61a

as an undergraduate student i taught extensively in uc berkeley’s computer science department, mainly focused on the course computer science 61a: the structure and interpretation of computer programs. cs 61a is the first prerequisite course for students interested in the major, so it’s nominally an introductory course, although the speed and intensity of the material makes it inordinately challenging for students who do not already have experience programming. i got involved with teaching because of what an obstacle the course was - especially for students of marginalized backgrounds, disabled students, and students with extenuating life circustances. my hope was to contribute (at least in a small way) to making the course more accessible. notably, cs 61a is one of the (if not the) largest in-person courses in the united states, enrolling approximately 2000 students in fall semesters, 1500 in spring semesters, and 300–700 in summer sessions. this means that working for the course not only involved teaching, but also working with the (custom) software infrastucture used to manage a course of this scale.

i taught cs 61a 9 semesters, including summers: 1 as an academic intern (unpaid), 2 as a course tutor, 3 as a teaching assistant, 2 as a head teaching assistant, and 1 as an instructor. my proudest contribution to the course was developing accessibility infrastructure for the course - especially regarding assignment extensions, for which there was no infrastructure before. i also taught special sections for students enrolled in berkeley’s cs scholars program, which is a program aimed at helping first-generation college students pursue computer science degrees. i lastly contributed in smaller ways to the course’s content generation and grading software.

i received extremely positive feedback that my contributions to the course made it more accessible for students who otherwise would have had difficulty managing the workload, and i received an outstanting graduate student instructor award in my last year. i still feel that the course had a long way to go at the time i graduated.

computer science mentors

in addition to my involvement as a teaching assistant, i was also a part of computer science mentors (csm), a student-run teaching organization offering small-group tutoring to students enrolled in lower-divison computer science classes. csm is one of the (if not the) largest such organizations in the united states, involving approximately 300 mentors and 1500 students each semester. csm is able to work at such scale because of its organizational structure, where senior mentors lead “families” of junior mentors to help them develop teaching skills. csm would consistently receive feedback from the department that we made up a crucial part of its teaching infrastucture by supporting students who did not have prior programming experience and training mentors who would then become undergraduate teaching assistants.

i was involved with csm for 6 semesters, over which i taught 5 small-group sections for 2 classes: computer science 61a and electrical engineering 16a (berkeley’s introductory electrical engineering course). in fall 2021 i taught csm’s first lgbtq+ affinity section, intended for students for whom there were otherwise not any designated spaces in the department. this was an expansion of csm’s existing affinity sections for women, and csm now offers many such affinity sections to students of all kinds of identities.

i was also involved in csm’s executive board as socials chair, external vice president, and president over various semesters.