About me

A person holding a lit poi in each hand. They're looking down towards them and lit by the glow. They're wearing a black t-shirt and blue jeans. The background is dark except for a thin string of lights.

Like so many sociolinguists, I grew up in New Jersey. After graduating high school, I moved to Waterloo, Belgium for a year, and then to Portland, Oregon for undergrad. I more or less lived in Portland until fall of 2024, when I moved to Southern California to start at UCSB.

I enjoy cooking, reading, art, animals, music, social dancing, and, as you can see pictured, fire flow arts (primarily poi and dragon staff).

I have a former life as a Supervisor and Senior Reactor Operator at the Reed Research Reactor, where I also oversaw the training program 2020-2022.

↓ Keep scrolling for my academic bio ↓

Current academic bio:

Mg. Montreal Benesch is a linguist, educator, and former nuclear scientist. They are a first year graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara and hold a BA in Linguistics from Reed College (‘22). Montreal’s research interests center on the social meanings of language: how they’re acquired, how they’re cognitively accessed, and how they’re used to create and navigate the social world, all with a focus on queer and trans language. Montreal has an upcoming chapter in the volume Battlefield Linguistics: Contemporary Contestations of Language, Gender, and Sexuality based on their queer sociophonetics BA thesis on the phonetic construction of gender by genderfluid individuals.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse