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Biography

Sonja L. Lanehart, Professor and Brackenridge Endowed Chair in Literature and the Humanities, received her B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. She is a former Ford Foundation Post-doctoral Fellow, Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral Fellow awardee, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, Lilly Teaching Fellow, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa National Honor Society and Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society. She has won grants from the National Science Foundation and other agencies. She has taught at the University of Georgia and the University of Texas at San Antonio.  Her teaching and research interests include: Sociolinguistics; Language, Literacy, and Education in African American Communities; Language and Identity; African American Women’s Language; Motivation, Self-efficacy, and Resilience; Goal sand Possible Selves; and Language Variation and Education.  Dr. Lanehart has published on all of the above interests. She was co-editor (with Paul Schutz) of Educational Researcher: Research News and Comment section, the lead journal of the American Educational Research Association, which is delivered to more than 23,000 members. She was also book review editor of American Speech. She is the author of Sista, Speak, Black Women Kinfolk Talk about Language and Literacy, which received Honorable Mention in the 2003 Myers Outstanding Book Award competition sponsored by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America, and editor of Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English. She is currently at work on a groundbreaking edited volume on African American Women’s Language based on her 2008 conference in San Antonio. More...

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