汤头条 English faculty member honored for linguistic innovations
Contact: Sarah Nicholas
STARKVILLE, Miss.鈥擜n associate professor of English is Mississippi State鈥檚 selection for 2017 Humanities Teacher of the Year.
Wendy Herd will be among some 30 higher education representatives the Mississippi Humanities Council recognizes early next year for outstanding achievements.
On campus, Herd鈥檚 tribute includes a $300 honorarium and invitation to deliver the College of Arts and Sciences Humanities Lecture. Titled 鈥淪ociophonetic Variation: Implications in the Classroom,鈥 her Nov. 29 public presentation begins at 3:30 p.m. in the Shackouls Honors College Forum Room of Griffis Residence Hall. A reception follows.
A member of the university faculty since 2011, Herd leads the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages program and is the founder of the Linguistics Research Laboratory. She also launched a teacher practicum that takes place each summer in Chile.
Her research interests include phonetics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and second-language acquisition. She currently is working with university peers in Louisiana and Indiana to investigate regional and social variations in pronunciation.
Established in 1972, the MHC is a private nonprofit corporation funded by Congress through the National Endowment for the Humanities. It works to provide public programs in traditional liberal arts disciplines that serve nonprofit groups statewide.
The 2018 recognition ceremony takes place Feb. 16 at the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson. For details, see .
Prior to earning master鈥檚 and doctoral degrees in linguistics from the University of Kansas, she also received a master鈥檚 in English with TESOL Certification at Missouri State University and simultaneous bachelor degrees in English and French at the University of Missouri.
Expressing appreciation that the MHC award 鈥渉ighlights the importance of both teaching and the humanities,鈥 Herd said she also is gratified to have 鈥渓earned so much from the exceptional and dedicated teachers that I work with at Mississippi State.鈥
Dan Punday, English department head, said he joins other colleagues in being 鈥減articularly excited that Wendy Herd has received this award because it draws attention to her work in developing a program in the teaching of English as a second language, which is of vital importance to the training of teachers all across Mississippi.鈥
The humanities honor is not Herd鈥檚 first professional accolade on campus. In 2012, she was awarded a Ottilie Schillig Special Teaching Grant and a College of Arts and Sciences Henry Family Research Fund Grant the following year.
Her research has been featured in Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. In collaboration with graduate and undergraduate students, two research articles, 鈥淭he Southern Vowel Shift in Women from Mississippi鈥 and 鈥淧honetic Drift in a First Language Dominant Environment,鈥 also were published in Proceedings of Meetings in Acoustics. For more, see .
For more about the campus humanities lecture, contact Gretchen Crawford, the college鈥檚 academic programs assistant, at 662-325-2645 or gretchen@deanas.msstate.edu.
汤头条 is Mississippi鈥檚 leading university, available online at .