Catherine Stafford

Credentials: Faculty Director of the Spanish House

Position title: Associate Professor

Email: cstafford@wisc.edu

Address:
1138 Van Hise Hall

headshot: Cathy Stafford

Spring 2025 Office Hours

Mondays: 11:00am-1:00pm
by appointment

Biography

Cathy Stafford is an associate professor of Hispanic Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. She is also a core faculty member of UW-Madison’s Doctoral Program in Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Her scholarly interests encompass various approaches to studying bilingual phenomena related to post-adolescent/adult SLA and the development and maintenance of Spanish in the U.S. in post-migration and Spanish-as-a-heritage-language (SHL) contexts. Pursuing longstanding curiosity about the workings of the mind/brain as people develop bilingualism, she was originally trained in linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to adult SLA, and she has researched and published on how cognition both influences and is influenced by language learning and use. Over the course of several years, Professor Stafford and a team of graduate students amassed a corpus of interviews and other language data from over 100 Spanish-English bilinguals from Wisconsin. In recent collaborative work using the corpus as a data source, she examines how bilingual people construct and negotiate identities in and through narrative; in this research she and graduate student collaborators train sociolinguistic and anthropological-linguistic lenses on social and interactional processes surrounding identity work in post-migration and SHL bilingual contexts.

Education

PhD, Georgetown University
MA, Middlebury College

Recent Honors and Awards

2017-2019. Wisconsin Language Roadmap Initiative, funded by a two-year grant from the Language Flagship of the National Security Education Program in the U.S. Department of Defense (co-PI with Robert Howell, Professor of German, and Guido Podestá, Dean of the International Division; Executive Director, Dr. Dianna Murphy)

2016. Phi Beta Kappa Excellence in Teaching Award

2015-2016. Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment Mini-Grant (co-PI with Joseph Salmons, Professor of German, UW-Madison)

Selected Publications

Goble, R. A., & C. Stafford (2022). Mid-aged Latin@s in the U.S. Midwest narrating sustained bilingualism through figured worlds of bilingualism research, professionalization, and advocacy. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 25, 2636-2652, DOI: 10.1080/13670050.2021.1943305

Stafford, C., & C. S. Azevedo. (2015). Variation in Spanish heritage speakers’ bilingualism and cognition. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 8, 429-439.

Stafford, C. (2013a). What’s on your mind? How private speech mediates cognition during initial non-primary language development. Applied Linguistics, 34, 151-172.

Stafford. C. (2013b). Spanish in Wisconsin: advantages of maintenance and prospects for sustained vitality. In T. Purnell, E. Raimy, & J. Salmons (Eds.), Wisconsin Talk: Linguistic diversity in the Badger State (pp. 123-141). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Stafford, C., Bowden, H., & Sanz, C. (2012). Optimizing language instruction: matters of explicitness, practice and cue learning. Language Learning, 62, 741-768