Rate My Professor Jennifer Austin

Jennifer Austin is a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey - Newark, holding the title of Professor of Spanish and Linguistics. She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics with a minor in Cognitive Science from Cornell University in 2001, where her dissertation examined language differentiation and morphosyntactic development in bilingual children acquiring Basque and Spanish. She also holds a B.A. in English and Spanish from Earlham College. Prior to joining Rutgers-Newark in 2002 as Assistant Professor of Spanish and Linguistics, she taught at Williams College from 1999 to 2002. At Rutgers, she advanced to Associate Professor in 2010 and full Professor in 2018, serving as Department Chair from 2011 to 2017. She is a member of the graduate faculty in Global Urban Studies and Psychology at Rutgers-Newark, and in Spanish and Portuguese at Rutgers-New Brunswick. Austin has received numerous grants, including a 2016 Chancellor’s Seed Grant of $40,000 as principal investigator for the Lives in Translation Project, a 2015 NSF grant as co-principal investigator, and the 2019-2020 Rutgers University Clement A. Price Human Dignity Award for her leadership in the Lives in Translation Project, which recruits student interpreters to assist immigrants with limited English proficiency. She co-founded HoLa, a dual-language charter school in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Austin's research focuses on first and second language acquisition, language contact, and the effects of bilingualism on language and cognition, with studies on syntactic and morphological development in children learning Basque, Spanish, and English. She co-authored the book Bilingualism in the Spanish-Speaking World: Linguistic and Cognitive Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2015) with María Blume and Liliana Sánchez. Key publications include 'Delay, interference and bilingual development: The acquisition of verbal morphology in children learning Basque and Spanish' (International Journal of Bilingualism, 2009), 'Grammatical interference and the acquisition of ergative case in bilingual children learning Basque and Spanish' (Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2007), and 'Continuity and development in the acquisition of inversion in yes/no questions' (Journal of Child Language, 2002). She edited a special issue on Bilingual Morphology in Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism (2019). Her work appears in journals such as Frontiers in Psychology, Hispania, Lingua, and Morphology, and in handbooks from Oxford, Routledge, and John Benjamins.