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About Karen Stollznow

 

Dr. Karen Stollznow is a linguist, researcher, and author.

Her forthcoming book explores the history and use of “bitch” in Bitch: The Journey of a Word (Cambridge University Press).

Karen is the author of the best-selling God Bless America (Pitchstone). Her latest books include On the Offensive: Prejudice in Language Past and Present (Cambridge University Press) and Missed Conceptions: How we make sense of infertility (Broadleaf Books).

Her other works include The Language of Discrimination, Language Myths, Mysteries and MagicHaunting America, Would You Believe It?, Fisher’s Ghost and Other Stories, and the novel Hits & Mrs.

Karen is currently a senior researcher at Griffith University on the Building Blocks of Meaning (BBoM) project. She also undertakes research into prejudice and discrimination in language with the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research.

She is a former postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, where she worked on the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) project involving endangered writing systems for the Department of Linguistics and Unicode. Karen has also worked as a Consultant Linguist for several major companies, including Leap Frog and Amazon.

Karen is a Host of Monster Talk (with Blake Smith), an award-winning science-based podcast that explores folklore, myths, and legends across cultures and time.

She has authored many academic papers and books about a range of areas in language and linguistics, including semantics and pragmatics, cross-cultural communication, and sociolinguistics, with special interests in the topics of discrimination and prejudice, gender studies and women’s health, and Australian and American culture and language. (Here is a review of her book about prejudice in language: On the Offensive.)

Karen also writes about a diverse array of popular topics, including language and culture, psychology, history, science, and religion. She contributes regularly to The Conversation and Psychology Today, while she has written previously for Scientific American Mind, Women’s Health, Australasian Science, Fortean Times, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. As an expert, she has appeared on national and international podcasts, radio, TV shows and documentaries, including A Current Affair, Today Tonight, NPR, Anderson Live, Alicia Menendez Tonight, and the History Channel’s History’s Greatest Mysteries and Miracles Decoded.

She has also written many historical-based short stories, including Unforeseen Circumstances, Don’t Leave Me, I Am Me, Welcome Home, The Dark Road, Room For One More (Lord Dufferin’s Tale), The Legend of the Screaming Skull, Leap of Faith, The Way We Weren’t and Oliver & Olivia.

She has performed a lot of voluntary work with various organizations across Australia and the US, including Vision Australia, Feeding America, and St. Vincent de Paul.

Karen was born in Sydney, Australia, and holds a PhD in linguistics from the University of New England. She formerly lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, and currently lives in Denver, Colorado, with her husband and their son.

Please support her research and work at Patreon and Ko-fi.