Catherine Stafford

Catherine Stafford (PhD, Hispanic Linguistics, Georgetown University) is a co-director of the Wisconsin Language Roadmap Initiative. She is an associate professor of Spanish and director of the PhD Program in Second Language Acquisition at UW-Madison.

Stafford’s research is concerned broadly with how people develop and sustain bilingualism, particularly immigrants and US-born Hispanics/Latinxs. In her research she examines interactive relationships among language, identity, and cognition, and her single- and co-authored work has appeared in journals such as Language Learning, Applied Linguistics, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, and Frontiers. She also contributed a book article on Spanish in Wisconsin to the 2013 volume Wisconsin Talk: Linguistic Diversity in the Badger State (University of Wisconsin Press). In recent work funded in part by a Baldwin Wisconsin Idea “mini grant” awarded to her and Professor of Linguistics Joseph Salmons, Stafford has collaborated with other UW faculty and graduate students conducting bilingualism research and engaging in community outreach to promote development and maintenance of immigrant and heritage languages across Wisconsin.