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.