Welcome to my website! My name is Sylvia Sierra and I am a linguist and Associate Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University, also affiliated with the Linguistic Studies program. My expertise is in interactional sociolinguistics, a subfield of discourse analysis. I primarily focus on analysis of everyday conversation in North American English. I also work on social media data in Mexican Spanish as well as on media more broadly (specifically, how people quote media in everyday conversation).

My book Millennials Talking Media:Creating Intertextual Identities in Everyday Conversation with Oxford University Press was published in 2021. In this book, I analyze how millennial friends make intertextual media references (to film, TV shows, books, songs, video games, and internet memes) in their everyday talk for specific interactional functions. My research has also been published in the journals Discourse & Society, Language in Society, Journal of Pragmatics, Discourse, Context & Media, and The Howard Journal of Communications. See my Publications page to download copies of my work.

I completed my Ph.D. in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University in 2016. Previously, I received a B.A. in Linguistics and Spanish from the University of Mary Washington (UMW), worked as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at the Instituto Tecnológico de Jiquilpan in Michoacán, Mexico, and then as a Prince William County Spanish teacher in Virginia. I also hold a Master of Education (M.Ed.) in Teaching English as a Second Language from UMW and an M.S. in linguistics from Georgetown.

Check out my book’s social media accounts here: https://linktr.ee/millennialstalkingmedia