Troy E. Spier, Ph.D.

Professional Bio

Troy E. Spier, Ph.D. is Associate Teaching Professor of English and Invited Professor of Linguistics at Universidad San Francisco de Quito. Prior to joining Penn State, he was Assistant Professor of English and Linguistics at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, FL (Go, Rattlers!). He has also held positions at Middle Georgia State University and Freie Universität Berlin, among others. Dr. Spier has taught students at the middle school, high school, community college, undergraduate, and graduate levels on multiple continents.

He specializes in language documentation and description in East and East-Central Africa (particularly in Zambia, Tanzania, and the DRC) and discourse analytic approaches to intersections of language, power, ideology, and religion. For the former, he has focused primarily on Ikyaushi, CiBemba, and KiSwahili; for the latter, principally on Islamophobic discourse in Latin America and Islamist propaganda from groups like al-Qa'idah, Da'esh, and al-Shabaab. His additional research interests include linguistic landscapes, corpus linguistics, and pedagogy. Additionally, he is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Arusha Working Papers in African Linguistics.