Jennifer Leeman, professor of Spanish linguistics in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at George Mason University, has been selected as a recipient of a 2024-25 Fulbright Scholar Award.
Leeman will spend the fall semester at the Universidad de Murcia in Spain, where she will lecture on topics in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, as well as aid in the supervision of doctoral students. She will also carry out a research project, an empirical study of language attitudes among international university students studying in Murcia, Spain.
“Murcia is a particularly interesting site for this research because the Murcian varieties of Spanish are often stigmatized or considered ‘incorrect,’ but they also convey ‘covert prestige’ and serve as markers of ‘authentic’ local identities,” Leeman said. “A lot of the previous research on Spaniards’ attitudes toward regional varieties of Spanish has been conducted by faculty and doctoral students at the Universidad de Murcia, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to learn from and collaborate with them, while also making connections to my own prior research on attitudes and ideologies in Spanish language teaching and study abroad.”
Fulbright is a program of the U.S. Department of State, with funding provided by the U.S. government. Fulbright Scholar Awards are prestigious and competitive fellowships that allow scholars to teach and conduct research abroad in order to establish long-term relationships between people and nations.