Dr. James Stratton (left) and Dr. J. Logan Smilges (right).
UBC English Language & Literatures is pleased to welcome two new Assistant Professors to our talented faculty.
Dr. J. Logan Smilges (they/them) is led by commitments to transfeminism and disability justice, and they specialize in queer and trans disability studies, rhetorical studies, and the history of medicine. They join us from Texas Woman’s University. Their first book, Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press, and their other writing can be found in Disability Studies Quarterly, College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, and elsewhere. Currently, Dr. Smilges serves as the co-chair for the Disability Studies Standing Group at the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
“I am looking forward to meeting UBC students and learning more about how I can support them in both their academic goals and longer career trajectories,” they write.
Dr. James Stratton (he/him) is a Germanic linguist specializing in variationist sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and second language acquisition. His work to date has focused on intensifier variation throughout the history of the English language, and across other Germanic languages. “I am particularly interested in the intersection between language and society, and how social factors such as gender and age influence the conscious and unconscious choices we make in everyday conversation,” writes Dr. Stratton.
Dr. Stratton received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Purdue University in 2022. He is currently engaged in two long-term research projects. The first investigates intensification in Germanic languages (modern and historical), a project which involves an examination of how linguistic and social factors shape the use and development of intensifying adverbs. The second aims to extend the use of variationist methods to the study of underrepresented speech communities, exploring what one might call socially conditioned lexical variation.
Welcome to UBC EL&L, Dr. Smilges and Dr. Stratton!
