Academics
A distinguished career as a linguist
Colleen earned a master’s and a doctorate in linguistics at the University of Arizona, where she focused on phonology and Native American languages. Her dissertation, O’odham Rhythms, focused on metrical and morphological patterns in the Tohono O’odham language. Tohono O’odham is a member of the Uto-Aztecan family and is spoken in Arizona and northern Mexico. She has published extensively on Tohono O’odham throughout her career, looking at phonological and prosodic issues, especially in poetic meter.
She began working with service-learning approaches in her classes at Texas Tech University, with two refereed papers and numerous presentations on that work. When she joined the University of Texas at Arlington in 2008, as the Chair of the Department of Linguistics and TESOL, she brought service-learning to the department’s undergraduate and graduate curriculum. She also integrated it into approaches to training students in language documentation and revitalization.
Impactful collaborations
A National Science Foundation-funded collaboration with Mary Linn, Ph.D., for the Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshops in 2012 and 2014 outlines this approach, which integrates service-learning into language documentation training.
In 2010, Colleen began a long-standing collaboration with Lokosh (Joshua D. Hinson, Ph.D.) on documenting the Chickasaw verb. The collaboration was also funded by the National Science Foundation and produced significant and valuable audio and video recordings of Chickasaw speakers still being processed and used by the Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program in Oklahoma.
She is a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (read the notice here) and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (read more).
Community Partnerships and Trainings
Colleen has supported partnerships and trainings for Native American and Indigenous communities for many years. From 2010-2022, she was a course facilitator or co-facilitator at every iteration of the Institute of Collaborative Language Research (CoLang; formerly InField). She directed CoLang 2014 at the University of Texas at Arlington.
She has taught or organized (or both) numerous other trainings and workshops, particularly on grant-writing. Most recently, in July 2025, she spoke on funding your language program at the University of California, Davis Conference on Indigenous Languages (COIL).
In 2020, Colleen founded a new section for the flagship journal of the Linguistic Society of America, Language. As the inaugural Associate Editor for this section, titled Language Revitalization and Documentation, she laid out a framework in this prestigious publication forum for important scholarly work in these areas to be recognized. Read more here.