Biography
Kendall Medford is a Ph.D. Candidate in Linguistics at Tulane. She holds a B.A. in Hispanic Linguistics from UNC Chapel Hill and an M.A. in Linguistics from Tulane. Before coming to Tulane, she served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Dominican Republic on the Dominican-Haitian border and received a Fulbright grant for teaching English in Brazil.
Her research explores language contact in situations of migration and how demographic factors, state policies, and varying levels of citizenship impact language maintenance in diasporic communities. She primarily studies these questions in the Caribbean, and has conducted fieldwork in both the Dominican Republic and Cuba. Her dissertation is the first ever large-scale study of Haitian Creole in the Dominican Republic. The project examines the role the language plays in the lives of Haitian migrants and their descendants in the country, and how variations in the language reflect the lived experiences of speakers.
Her writings have been published in NACLA, the Journal of Language Contact, and in several edited volumes. At Tulane, she has taught courses in Haitian Creole, linguistics, and Latin American Studies.
Selected Publications:
2023. Haitian Creole in the Caribbean: Exploring Haitian Sociolinguistic Contact in the Dominican Republic and Cuba. In: Language, Decoloniality, and Social Justice in the Caribbean. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
2022. In the Dominican Republic, Language Barriers Complicate Life for Haitian Migrants. NACLA.