Katie Anne Conner (she/her) is an 8th year PhD linguistics student. As a sociolinguist, her research program focuses on the perception of young women's voices (e.g., speaking style, metalinguistic commentary on them, gendered taboo language and gendered slurs), and more broadly gender and sexuality. 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 her current corpus-study work on use, meaning, and change over time of the term bitch. She is currently preparing for her dissertation on gendered slurs (building from her bitch study), and publications stemming from this.  Some of her past work has included her MA thesis on the relationship between LGB speaking styles and listener 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. 

In addition to teaching courses in the Linguistics department at OSU, 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 also served as a GA for the Council of Graduates Students at The Ohio State University as Vice President from Mary 2022 through May 2025, where she ran elections and delegate-focused operations, and served as the Chair of the Hayes Advanced Research Forum Organizing Committee for the 37th, 38th, and 39th Hayes Forums. She also has worked with the Student Life Student Organizations Team as a GA, primarily working on "Get Involved" for First-Year Orientation in the summer, and working with the team on all things student organization (with an emphasis on graduate and professional student organization support) during the year from May 2025 - August 2026. During Fall 2026, she will be serving as an Editor on the 14th edition of Language Files.

She is originally from the East Coast and considers both St. Mary's County, MD and Hampton Road, VA her hometown(s). She earned her BA from Virginia Tech in Theatre & Cinema (with a performance focus) 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, playing board and video games, and attempting to keep her two cats from eating things they shouldn't.