Dr. Karen Stollznow is a linguist, author, researcher, and speaker whose work explores the intersections of language, culture, identity, and belief.
Her forthcoming book, Beyond Words: How We Learn, Use, and Lose Language, asks the big questions: What is language? Where did it come from? How do babies learn it from scratch? How do we pick up languages beyond our mother tongue? This eye-opening book answers big questions about language and the mind, explaining how we use and understand language, and what happens when things go wrong.
Karen’s most recent release, Bitch: The Journey of a Word (Cambridge University Press, 2024), offers a bold and insightful deep-dive into the surprising history, culture, and ever-changing meaning of this powerful and controversial word.
Dr. Karen is also the author of On the Offensive: Prejudice in Language Past and Present (Cambridge University Press), named an Outstanding Academic Title in the 2023 Choice awards, the American Library Association’s (ALA) prestigious annual list. This critically acclaimed book examines how bias is embedded in our everyday language, and what that means for society.
Other recent titles include Missed Conceptions: How we make sense of infertility (Broadleaf Books), the best-selling God Bless America (Pitchstone Publishing), and also The Language of Discrimination; Language Myths, Mysteries and Magic; Haunting America; Would You Believe It?; Fisher’s Ghost and Other Stories; and the novel Hits & Mrs.
Along with Blake Smith, Karen is a Host of Monster Talk, a popular podcast that uses monsters, history, folklore, and legends as a springboard to explore science and the humanities. Monster Talk is an award-winning show that has had over 9 million downloads. The podcast covers a wide range of topics, from legendary creatures, such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, through to mysteries like the Bermuda Triangle. Over the years, the hosts have tackled a wide range of paranormal phenomena, including vampires, zombies, werewolves, ghosts, and much more.
Dr. Karen has also authored many scholarly works about language and linguistics, including lexical semantics, intercultural communication, and applied linguistics, with special interests in taboo language, discrimination and prejudice, gender and sexism, women’s health, and Australian and American culture and language. (Here is a review of her book about language and prejudice: On the Offensive.)
Karen writes about a diverse array of popular topics for general audiences, including language and culture, psychology, history, and science. She contributes regularly to The Conversation and Psychology Today, while she has also written for Scientific American Mind, Women’s Health, Australasian Science, Fortean Times, Reader’s Digest, and other publications.
She is frequently invited as an expert guest on national and international podcasts, radio, TV shows, and documentaries, including A Current Affair, Today Tonight, ABC radio, NPR, Anderson Live, Alicia Menendez Tonight, the History Channel’s History’s Greatest Mysteries and Miracles Decoded, and Netflix’s Files of the Unexplained.
She has also written short fiction, including the stories 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, Oliver & Olivia, and The Legend of Abraham Lincoln’s Ghost Train.
Karen currently holds dual roles as Visiting Scholar at the University of Colorado, Boulder and Griffith University.
She was formerly a Senior Researcher at Griffith on the Building Blocks of Meaning (BBoM) project. She now undertakes research into prejudice and discrimination in language with the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research. She was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley as well, where she worked on the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) project involving endangered writing systems for the Department of Linguistics and Unicode. Her industry experience includes consulting for major companies such as Amazon and LeapFrog.
Karen also volunteers with community organizations in both Australia and the US, including Vision Australia, Feeding America, and St. Vincent de Paul.
Originally from Sydney, Australia, Karen holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of New England. She previously lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and now resides in Denver, Colorado, with her husband and son.