About Anne Charity Hudley

Anne H. Charity Hudley is Assistant Professor of English and the inaugural William & Mary Professor of Community Studies. She is also the Director of the Linguistics Laboratory.

Anne was raised in Varina, Henrico County, Virginia, where her family still lives. She graduated cum laude from St. Catherine’s School in Richmond, Virginia, where she attended kindergarten through twelfth grade. She earned a BA magna cum laude and a MA from Harvard University both in 1998. She earned a PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005 where she studied with William Labov, the founder of variationist sociolinguistics. Anne was awarded a Ford Dissertation Fellowship in 2003 and from 2003-2005 years she was the Thurgood Marshall Dissertation Fellow in Residence at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Anne received a National Science Foundation Minority Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2005. She joined the William and Mary faculty in Fall 2005 and was awarded a National Science Foundation Minority Starter Grant in 2008. Her local affiliations and dedication to the local community drew her back to Virginia and to William & Mary and they are the driving force behind her most basic interests as an academic.

Anne teaches community centered courses on American Speech, African-American English, language variation and change, language and education and speaker’s attitudes towards language variation in the United States. She and her students serve in Williamsburg James City County schools as well as in independent schools in the Richmond area.

Anne’s research interests are situated at the intersections of linguistics, psychology, African-American Studies and education. Her publications address the relationship between language variation and K-16 educational practices and policies. She has published articles in Child Development, Language Variation and Change, American Speech, and in several book collections on African-American English and Education including the Handbook of African-American Psychology. With Christine Mallinson of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, she co-authored a book entitled Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schoolsthat was invited by James Banks, the editor of the Teachers College Press Multicultural Education Series and a founder of the field of multicultural education.

She has worked with K-12 teachers through lectures and workshops sponsored by the American Federation of Teachers and by public and independents schools in many districts including Washington DC, Orlando, FL, New Orleans, LA, Cleveland, OH, Philadelphia, PA and Richmond, VA. She serves on the Board of Trustees of the Orchard House School in Richmond, VA. She has guest taught courses for teachers and education researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and teaches every summer at Virginia Commonwealth University in their summer workshop series for classroom teachers. Anne has also worked as a consultant to the National Science Foundation’s Committee on Broadening Participation in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and currently serves as a consultant to the National Research Council’s Committee on Language and Education.