Department of French and Italian

Amber has a B.A. in French with minors in German and Psychology (University of Wyoming, 2005) and a Licence in Sciences du langage specializing in French Language Education (l’Université de Rouen, 2010). She holds an M.A. in French Linguistics (Indiana University, 2012) and is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in French Linguistics with a minor in Second Language Acquisition, specializing in language variation and change. For her dissertation, she is working with new speakers of Picard, an endangered minority language of northern France, assessing the state of their interlanguage grammar and thereby assessing the state of the language as a whole as new speakers become the main users of this language. Amber has spent nearly half her adult life teaching and studying in different regions of France and has come to appreciate its diversity in all of its sounds, colors, and flavors.