Katie Conner (she/her) is a 6th year PhD linguistics student. As a sociolinguist, her research program focuses on gender, sexuality, & the perception of young women's voices (e.g., speaking style, metalinguistic commentary on them, gendered taboo language and gendered slurs). Her research program is broadly focused on the ways in which gender frames and informs listeners' perception of speakers, and additionally examines the ways in which gender informs speakers' own self-expression of identity and ideology through social indexical links. While her main methodological "home" focuses on experimental and quantitative sociolinguistic methods (using inferential and descriptive statistics), she also values and has utilized qualitative methods such as discourse analytic methods (conversation analysis and critical discourse analysis), programming tools and languages such as Unix and Python3, and corpus methods in her work. 

Her most recent work includes a study on vocal creak and professionalism perceptions in young women's voices and she is currently preparing for her dissertation on gendered slurs, and publications stemming from this.  She won the Linguistics Department's GTA award for 21-22 for her work teaching LING 2367.01 "Language and Gender" as instructor of record. She has also worked on outreach and public facing language science at COSI and as a GRA on the "Science of Language and Language of Science" REU at OSU. She won "Best Project Launch" talk at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 50 (NWAV50) at Stanford University in 2022. Some of her past work has included her MA thesis on the relationship between LGB speaking styles and the listeners perceptions and ideologies of those styles, online discourses concerning sexual violence against women on college campuses and the #MeToo movement on Twitter and Facebook, and how speakers' gender prototypicality influences listeners' true and false recall within the Roediger, Deese, McDermott false memory paradigm. 

She is originally from the East Coast and considers both St. Mary's County, MD and Virginia Beach, VA her home. She earned her BA from Virginia Tech in Theatre Performance with a minor in Women and Gender Studies in 2016, and her MA in English (Linguistics concentration) from North Carolina State University in 2018. In her spare time she enjoys gardening, reading, crocheting, watching bad reality tv, and playing board and video games.