Alicia is a doctoral student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, studying Hispanic Linguistics. Originally from California, she received a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics and in Spanish Language & Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and then a Master of Arts in Spanish Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her academic interests are sociolinguistics, language variation and change, phonetics and phonology, bi- and multilingualism, and the revitalization of the minority Iberian languages. Her research will focus on contact zones, how languages affect each other when co-existing, and what kinds of innovative features emerge as a result. Alicia speaks English and Spanish, with varying levels of Portuguese, Catalan, Basque, French, and Romanian. Her other interests include ska and punk shows (particularly in other countries and in other languages) and calquing between languages.