Jennifer Sclafani is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and former Associate Teaching Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She has 18 years of university teaching experience in the areas of general linguistics, sociolinguistics, educational linguistics, and discourse analysis. Her research focuses on language and social justice, intercultural communication, political discourse analysis, gender and the media, and language and identity in contexts of migration and globalization.

Dr. Sclafani’s research on the language of Donald Trump has been published as a book, Talking Donald Trump: A Sociolinguistic Study of Style, Metadiscourse, and Political Identity (Routledge, 2017), and her analyses of US presidential politics have been featured in news outlets including The Washington Post, Scientific American, CNN Politics, BBC Radio 4, PBS News Hour, CBC Radio, and The Guardian, among others. Her research has also appeared in academic journals, such as Language in Society and Journal of Sociolinguistics.

She is currently leading the Justice Language Action Project, an educational outreach project that provides professional development to K-12 teachers by providing focused training in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and critical pedagogy, guides them in applying CDA to their teaching practice, and assists them in developing social justice-themed curricular units in all content areas for their classrooms.

She is also currently working on a textbook, Intercultural Communication: An Interactional Sociolinguistic Approach, to be published by Routledge.