New Faculty: Simanique Moody

Brooklyn College is indeed fortunate that Simanique Moody has brought her love of languages and cultures, as well as her remarkable teaching and research experience, to the Linguistics Program in the Department of English. Moody comes to the college by way of Georgia, Minnesota, California, and the Netherlands. A speaker of multiple languages including French, Spanish, and Haitian Creole, Moody specializes in African American language, particularly its roots and current practice in Georgia. She is especially interested in the sociohistorical contexts that have shaped language development in the region over time. For instance, she points out intriguing linguistic connections between the speech of her research collaborators in southeast Georgia and the speech of people from Barbados and the Bahamas. To dig deeper into a wide range of syntactic and semantic variation, Moody is developing a sociolinguistics research space, which, when it is finished, will be outfitted with workstations, a sound booth, and audio and video recording equipment to train students to conduct linguistic experiments.

A stellar undergraduate, Assistant Professor Moody was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota, where she designed her own major, "Social Justice Issues in Post-Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean." Her program of study included courses in French, Spanish, linguistics, and international relations. She credits her linguistics professor for inspiring her to pursue her passion for other languages and cultures by earning a Ph.D. in linguistics at New York University. Her M.A. thesis analyzed syllable structure in Haitian Creole, and for her Ph.D., she studied linguistic variation in varieties of African American Vernacular English spoken alongside the Gullah/Geechee language in southeast Georgia.

Moody brings a wealth of teaching experience to the college, having held a position as university lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and having taught in New York City private and charter schools, as a TESOL instructor in East New York, as a teaching assistant at NYU, and as a part-time instructor at City College (CUNY). She relishes teaching, explaining her perspective as follows: "I enjoy exchanging ideas with my students and finding different ways to engage with the diversity of learning styles and unique perspectives they bring to the classroom."

Further, regarding her teaching philosophy, Moody states, "Though the dynamics of each class may differ, I try to remain consistent in bringing enthusiasm and passion to the subjects I teach and practicing the kind of innovation in the classroom that will activate, challenge, and inspire students to learn and excel." After seven years of teaching in the Netherlands, Moody is now a Brooklyn College professor and a resident of the Flatbush/Midwood neighborhood, living just steps from the campus. Moody says she chose Brooklyn College because she was excited about the possibility of getting undergraduate students actively involved in her research, noting that Brooklyn offers a tremendous amount of linguistic and cultural diversity. "Naturally, I looked forward to building on some of that diversity in the classroom, and I haven't been disappointed." Now teaching a foundational course in sociolinguistics and settling into campus life, Moody conveys an energy and sense of purpose to everyone who meets her. Indeed we are pleased to welcome her considerable gifts and infectious vitality to the campus.