Tyler Kendall

Dr. Tyler Kendall joined the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law in the Summer of 2024, where he serves as the Center’s Research Director.

Tyler is an experienced research administrator and researcher in the language sciences. He earned his PhD in English Linguistics at Duke in 2009. He then held a post-doc appointment in Linguistics at Northwestern University before moving to the University of Oregon, where he was Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Language Variation and Computation Lab. His research on language variation and change, and infrastructure work to expand methods and data for spoken language research, has been supported by several NSF grants, as well as by other international funding agencies. He publishes on a range of topics from the management and analysis of spoken language data, to computational methods in language and speech analysis, to interrelationships between speech perception and production, to language in legal contexts, and to the historical development of current American English dialects. He has developed several major language resources including the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project at NC State University and the Corpus of Regional African American Language at the University of Oregon.

From 2019-2022, Tyler served as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation where he managed three programs in the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences in the Directorate of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences and served on several cross-directorate working groups. He is drawn to the Center because of his interests in promoting social justice and working toward a more equitable and just society.

You can see Tyler’s publications on his Duke Scholars page.