David Durian

I am an Assistant Teaching Professor at Penn State University. I have a PhD in Linguistics from The Ohio State University, as well as an MA in English (Rhetoric and Professional Writing) from Northern Illinois University. I currently teach English 202A: Writing in the Social Sciences and English 15: Rhetoric and Composition. I have been teaching college level courses since 2005, and before I came to Penn State, I taught at a variety of other colleges and universities located in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, and Texas. These include Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, The Ohio State University, Northern Illinois University, College of DuPage, and Rice University, among others.

I originally hail from the Chicagoland area, where I was raised and lived until I was 27 years old. Following that, I lived in Columbus, OH for almost 8 years while working on my PhD, before moving back to Chicagoland for another 6. My living in both of these areas, and now in central PA since 2018, has had a significant impact on my research in Linguistics.

In my research, I study accent variation in American English based on social factors such as socio-economic class, age, sex, and race among English-speaking working and middle class European and African Americans living in the United States. In doing so, I look at both current language use and also historical language use in American English during the late 19th, 20th, and 21st Centuries. In addition, I focus on the interface of regional and social dialectology and urban geography in an attempt to explore further the social motivations for language variation and change in my data.

In my current research, I study present-day pronunciation variation in the vowel systems of middle and working class European and African American Americans living in three areas of the country: Columbus, OH, Chicago, IL, and Central Pennsylvania. I also study historical changes in pronunciation in each of these areas across the mid-19th Century, the entire 20th Century, and the beginning of the 21st Century, as reflected in the vowel systems of Columbusites, Chicagoans, and Central Pennsylvanians born throughout much of this time period. This work involves the instrumental, acoustic analysis of data, and draws on the theories from the fields of phonology, phonetics, and sociolinguistics to explain how and why the vowel variation and sound change occurs.

I also conduct research on the genre of scientific writing as it occurs in linguistic research, as well as how various rhetorical strategies are carried out in scientific writing. My MA Thesis, entitled "The Genre of the Linguistics Article within Studies of Language Variation and Change: A Diachronic Perspective, 1891-2015" looks at how the genre conventions of the research article have changed across time within the linguistic subfield of dialectology. In doing so, this research provides an intersection between my background in linguistics and my background in rhetoric and professional writing.