Spanish: Spanish in the US; heritage language education; critical, antiracist language teaching; ethnicity, race, and language in censuses; language and social justice
Jennifer Leeman’s research and teaching focus on the sociopolitics of language, with particular attention to multilingualism, Spanish in the US, and the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language. Her work is interdisciplinary and employs the theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches of critical applied linguistics and sociolinguistics while also engaging the fields of education, Latinx studies, language policy, and linguistic anthropology.
Leeman's publications have examined the interplay of ideologies of language, race and nation in the US, the racialization of Spanish and Latinxs, census questions on language and ethnoracial identity, multilingual language policy, linguistic landscape, heritage language education, and critical pedagogical approaches to teaching Spanish. She was founding Director of George Mason's online graduate certificate in Spanish Heritage Language Education, which launched in 2021, and she organizes the Department of Modern and Classical Languages' online SHLE lecture series.
In addition to her academic appointment, Leeman served for almost a decade as Research Sociolinguist in the US Census Bureau's Center for Survey Measurement, where she conducted research and provided guidance on linguistic and sociolinguistic issues related to multilingual data collection, such as language access, translation procedures and Spanish-language survey questions on language, ethnicity and race. Currently she serves as a senior expert on the international advisory board of Diversity beyond Migration Background – New Categories for Anti-Discrimination Data, a research network funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Leeman has served on the Executive Committee of the American Association of Applied Linguistics; the Advisory Committee of the Observatorio de la lengua española y las culturas hispánicas en los Estados Unidos, Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University; and the Executive Committee of Language & Society Division of the Modern Language Association, as well as the editorial boards of the journals Language Policy, Linguistic Landscape, Language Teaching & Technology, Spanish as a Heritage Language, and Spanish in Context.
With collaborators Dr. Galey Modan (Ohio State University) and Dr. Lou Thomas (Bard Early College DC), Leeman is currently researching how bilingual education and dual immersion instruction fit into the larger economic, political and ethnoracial landscape of gentrification in Washington, DC by examining the interplay of educational policies (such as school boundaries and accountability measures), housing prices, and discourses about the economic and social value of Spanish.
She is currently working on a co-authored book (with Yvette Bürki and Adriana Patiño-Santos) on the sociolinguistics of Spanish in a broad range of national and diasporic contexts, with an emphasis on multilingualism. The book, titled Lengua, sociedad y poder. Perspectivas críticas en torno al español ('Language, society and power. Critical perspectives on Spanish'), is under contract with Routledge.
Leeman is also involved in several projects related to critical pedagogical approaches to language education, including teaching Spanish as a heritage language and/or second language, study abroad, and teacher preparation.
Books
Leeman, J. & Fuller, J. (2021) Hablar español en Estados Unidos: La sociopolítica del lenguaje. Multilingual Matters.
Fuller, J. & Leeman, J. (2020) Speaking Spanish in the US: The Sociopolitics of Language. Multilingual Matters.
Lacorte, M. & Leeman, J. (Eds). (2009). Español en Estados Unidos y otros contextos de contacto: Sociolingüística, ideología y pedagogía / Spanish in the US and other contact environments: Sociolinguistics, ideology and pedagogy. Madrid: Iberoamericana.
Recent articles and chapters
Leeman, J. (2023). (In)visible identities and inequities: The construction of Latinidad in European censuses. In R. Márquez-Reiter & A. Patiño-Santos (Eds.), Language practices and processes among Latin Americans in Europe (pp. 1–24). Routledge.
Nguyen, M., Serafini, E., Leeman, J. & Winsler, A. (2022). Factors predicting secondary school language course enrollment and performance among US heritage speakers of Spanish. Frontiers in Psychology (Language Sciences section). Volume 13 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1035716
Leeman, J. and Showstack, R. (2022). The sociolinguistics of heritage language education. In K. Geeslin, (Ed.) Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Sociolinguistics (pp. 328-340), New York: Routledge.
Leeman, J. & Driver, M. (2021) Heritage speakers of Spanish and study abroad: Shifting identities in new contexts. In R. Pozzi, T. Quan, & C. Escalante (Eds.) Heritage Speakers of Spanish and Study Abroad (pp. 141-159). New York: Routledge.
Leeman, J. & Serafini, E. J. (2021). “It’s Not Fair”: Discourses of Deficit, Equity, and Effort in Mixed Heritage and Second Language Spanish Classes. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 20:6, 425-439.
Leeman, J. (2020). The nexus of academic knowledge, political agendas and self-identification in census ethnoracial classification. Language, Culture and Society (2)1 92-99.
Leeman, J. (2020). Los datos censales en el estudio del multilingüismo y la migración: Cuestiones ideológicas y consecuencias epistémicas. Iberoromania. 2020(91): 77-92.
Leeman, J. (2019). Measured multilingualism: Census language questions in Canada and the US. In T. Ricento. Language Politics and Policies: Perspectives from Canada and the United States (pp. 114-134). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leeman, J. (2018). Becoming Hispanic: The negotiation of ethnoracial identity in U.S. census interviews.Latino Studies 16(4), 432-460.
Leeman, J. (2018). It’s all about English: The interplay of monolingual ideologies, language policies and the US Census Bureau’s statistics on multilingualism. The International Journal of the Sociology of Language, (252) 21-43.
Leeman, J. (2018). Critical language awareness in SHL: Challenging the linguistic subordination of US Latinxs. In K. Potowski (Ed.) Handbook of Spanish as a Minority/Heritage Language (pp. 345-358). New York: Routledge.
In Spring 2024, Leeman will be a residential fellow at Mason's Center for Humanities Research.
(Recent offerings)
SPAN 315 Spanish for Heritage Speakers
SPAN 323 The Sociopolitics of Multilingualism in Spain
FRLN 385 Multilingualism, Identity, and Power
SPAN 385 Introduction to Spanish Linguistics
SPAN 430 Spanish in the US
SPAN 502 Hispanic Sociolinguistics
SPAN 551 The Sociolinguistics of Spanish in the US
SPAN 570 Language Politics and Policy
FRLN 575 Heritage Language Education
BA (Spanish) University of Pennsylvania
MA (Hispanic Civilization) New York University in Madrid
MAT (TESOL & Bilingual Education) Georgetown University
PhD (Hispanic Linguistics) Georgetown University
Spanish in the US: The intertwining of language, race and nation. Faculty of Humanities, University of Bern, Switzerland. October 2023.
La sociopolítica del español en Estados Unidos. ARQUS International Seminar in Romance Studies : Ibero-Romance Languages in Europe and America (Contacts, Influences, Convergencies). Departamento de Filologías: Románica, Italiana, Gallego-Portuguesa y Catalana, Universidad de Granada. Granada, Spain. October 2023.
Language and discrimination. Antidiscrimination/Equality Data Online Workshop. German Research Foundation (DFG): Diversity Beyond Migration Background – New Categories for Anti-Discrimination Data research network. September 2023.
Gentrification and bilingual education: Spatial and metaphorical intersections. Disputed urban territories: Linguistic and discursive materializations of dystopia and utopia colloquium, 14th Linguistic Landscape Workshop - Utopia and Dystopia, Madrid. September 2023. (with Gabriella Modan and Louis Thomas)
Beyond the English-medium classroom: Critical scholarship on language ideologies, identities and pedagogy in second and heritage language education. Multilingual Research Center Speaker Series, University of Maryland, College Park. March, 2023.
Beyond standard language and Latinidad: Ideologies and identities in Spanish heritage language education. Department of Modern Languages, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. February, 2023.
Is it Hispanic, Latinx or Latine? The complexities of Latino identity. The Washington Post. (10/1/2022) https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/01/hispanic-latino-latinx-latine-words-history/
Interviewed by Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera for New Books Network en español. 9/20/2023. https://newbooksnetwork.com/es/hablar-espanol-en-estados-unidos