Rate My Professor Hunter Hatfield

Associate Professor Hunter Hatfield is a faculty member in the Department of English and Linguistics within the Division of Humanities at the University of Otago. He holds an MA from the University of Mississippi and a PhD from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. His academic career at Otago has progressed from lecturer to associate professor, during which he has earned recognition for teaching excellence, including the Overall Top Teacher Award from the Otago University Students' Association in 2015. Currently, he also serves as Associate Dean International for the Division of Humanities, where he provides advice on international academic developments and helps build global collaborations and networks.

Hatfield's research is centered in psycholinguistics, using quantitative and experimental methods to investigate how the mind handles language. His interests encompass syntactic processing, speech perception and production, experimental pragmatics, and the interplay of cognitive, formal, and social factors in language understanding. Ongoing projects include exploring relationships between writing abilities, student backgrounds, psychometric traits, and academic performance to foster university success; examining language's role in sustaining social relationships, often with collaborator Dr. Jeewon Hahn; studying adaptation to novel speech patterns across syntax, phonology, pragmatics, and multimodal cues; and applying category theory from mathematics to describe phonological structures and language processing stability over time. He supervises postgraduate students on projects aligned with these lab directions, particularly those involving timescales from milliseconds to decades. Hatfield teaches courses such as LING 111 A World of Languages, LING 240 Language, Brain and Being Human, LING 318 Child Language, LING 342 Laboratory Phonology, LING 415 Psycholinguistics, and LING 423 Special Topic: Language Processing. He developed the University for Your Life (UniForYou) programme in 2016 and 2017 to aid student reflection on goals and participated in the Division of Humanities' working parties on Rethinking the BA and Core Papers. Key publications include the authored book Dynamic Approaches to Phonological Processing (Cambridge University Press, 2023); "Pinyin is an effective proxy for early screening for Mandarin-speaking children at risk of reading disorders" (Frontiers in Psychology, 2020, co-authored with S. Ma et al.); "Building a tool for text corpus analysis without programming" (conference proceedings, 2022, with E. Hogg); and "Finding novel ideas in writing through computational graph-theoretic analysis" (conference proceedings, 2021, with M. Cop).