Academic Projects
Academic Projects
For my BA thesis at Reed College, advised by Sameer ud Dowla Khan, I did an intraspeaker production study investigating how genderfluid people (like myself) use linguistic variables to construct our genders. It got me curious about intraspeaker variation more broadly, the operationalization of gender in linguistic research, and how we acquire associations between language and social meaning.
Publications:
Forthcoming: Montreal Benesch. /s/tylizing the /s/elf: The concurrent fluidity of language and gender. In Francesca Vigo and Scott Burnett, editors, Battlefield linguistics: Contemporary contestations of language, gender, and sexuality. De Gruyter Mouton.
Montreal Benesch. /s/tylizing the /s/elf: The concurrent fluidity of language and gender [Unpublished BA thesis, Reed College]. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.21466.62405.
Presentations:
October 2022: Montreal Benesch. New Ways of Analyzing Gender Variation. New Ways of Analyzing Variation 50. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.26322.02243. [cross-listed in the Operationalizing gender section]
May 2022: Montreal Benesch. /s/tylizing the /s/elf: A first look into the concurrent fluidity of gender and language. Lavender Languages and Linguistics 28. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.31093.24806/1.
I gave similar versions of this talk as a poster at PerForum (June 2022) and as talks at Cascadia Workshop in Sociolinguistics 4 (May 2022), the Third Annual Emory Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (April 2022), the Sixth Annual Berkeley Undergraduate Symposium (April 2022, where Cooper and I met!), and Toronto Undergraduate Linguistics Conference 15 (March 2022).
Operationalizing gender for my research on genderfluidity necessarily required innovative measures of gender if I wanted to do it ethically. I ended up having participants devise their own gender scales, and presenting this work at NWAV led me into a collaboration with Cooper Bedin, Marina Zhukova, and Lal Zimman, who were thinking through these same issues. Together, we show that affirming, gender-expansive measures are also more statistically meaningful, and offer suggestions as to what that can look like in others' work.
Publications:
Cooper Bedin, Montreal Benesch, Marina Zhukova, and Lal Zimman. (2024). Current norms and best practices for collecting and representing sex/gender in linguistics: Towards ethical and inclusive methodologies. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 9(1):5668. DOI: 10.3765/plsa.v9i1.5668.
In preparation: Cooper Bedin, Montreal Benesch, Marina Zhukova, and Lal Zimman. Asking gender in sociophonetics.
Workshops:
January 2024: Cooper Bedin, Montreal Benesch, Kirby Conrod, Marina Zhukova, and Lal Zimman. The gender question: Current best practices for asking about sex/gender in linguistic research. Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.32242.93128.
Presentations:
Upcoming, July 2025: Cooper Bedin, Montreal Benesch, Marina Zhukova, and Lal Zimman. Expansive, intersectional. . . and quantitative?? Innovating critical approaches to gendered sociophonetic variation. International Gender and Language Association 13.
January 2024: Cooper Bedin, Montreal Benesch, Marina Zhukova, and Lal Zimman. Current norms and best practices for collecting and representing sex/gender in linguistics: Towards ethical and inclusive methodologies. Linguistics Society of America Annual Meeting. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.10222.83521.
October 2023: Cooper Bedin, Montreal Benesch, Marina Zhukova, and Lal Zimman. Operationalizing gender: Implications of participant-driven measurements and Methods for statistical modeling of open-response demographic data. New Ways of Analyzing Variation 51. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.21108.16007.
October 2022: Montreal Benesch. New Ways of Analyzing Gender Variation. New Ways of Analyzing Variation 50. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.26322.02243. [cross-listed in the Genderfluidity section]
Archie Crowley and I organized a panel for the 2nd International Trans Studies Conference called Trans languages, trans lives: Offerings from language research to trans studies, with talks from Ariana Steele, Dozandri Mendoza, Lexi Webster, and Kris Aric Knisely, as well as a brief talk of our own.
Presentations:
September 2024: Montreal Benesch and Archie Crowley. Resisting (cis)normativities in language research. The 2nd International Trans Studies Conference. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.32400.01286.
I organized an art show for multilingual trans people to display art about how their identities (transness but also disability status, race, etc.) affect the way they use, interpret, and feel about languages. More detail about the show and its inspirations can be found here.
A physical gallery went up in Portland, OR the 12-14th of July 2024, and the virtual gallery lives on here. The art show was made possible by the 2024 Kirby Conrod LGBTQ+ LingComm Grant.
Presentations:
Upcoming, May 2025: Montreal Benesch, artists TBA. Languaging to trans*form: A mobile archive of the trans*languaging art show [Poster]. The 2025 Society for Linguistic Anthropology Biennial Conference.
April 2025: Montreal Benesch, Max Ongbongan, and Ray Perry. The trans*languaging art show [Poster]. The International Conference on Linguistics Communication 2025.
Together with my frequent collaborator, roommate, and best friend Cooper Bedin, I have a chapter in GirlDad Press' soon-to-be-published book-shaped object, Sex Change and the City. Our essay is about neoliberalism and discourses of non-binary representation in media.
Publications:
Forthcoming: Cooper Bedin and Montreal Benesch. “Carrie’s Fables” or: How I learned to stop misgendering and love trans people. In Tuck Woodstock and Niko Stratis, editors, Sex Change and the City. GirlDad Press.
Presentations:
April 2025: Cooper Bedin and Montreal Benesch. “Representing everyone else outside these two boring genders”: The role of popular media in trans language activism [Poster]. The International Conference on Linguistics Communication 2025.
Since arriving at UCSB I've gotten involved in Prof. Laurel Brehm's research project that looks at how people react to a novel word that sounds like a word they know (e.g., "panana"): do they repair, thinking the other person made a mistake, or learn, thinking it's a new word they haven't heard yet?
I'm part of the team running the eye-tracking experiment at the local children's museum, MOXI. It's cute how much the kids enjoy participating - I had one come by, participate, run off to the rest of the museum, and then come back again 20 minutes later asking if they could do it again.
Other collaborators are running the experiment in the lab with college student participants, and we compare how people vary across their lifetimes in terms of the choice to learn or repair.
Presentations:
March 2025: Laurel Brehm, Yanlu Zhong, and Montreal Benesch. Novel word learning and repair through the lifespan [Poster]. 38th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, College Park, Maryland.
I'm the only person who calls it the girlboss study, but I keep hoping it'll catch on... perceptions of uptalk based on the persona-context the listener was primed with (either girlboss, Valley Girl, stoner, twink, butch, or no prime).
Publications:
In revisions: Kara Becker, Montreal Benesch, Satchel Petty, and Parker Scarpa. Variation in the indexical field: Exploring the social meanings of uptalk and personae in perception.
Presentations:
March 2023: Parker Scarpa, Satchel Petty, Montreal Benesch, and Kara Becker. Perceptions of gender and sexuality in language: An experimental study of uptalk. 42nd Annual Gender Studies Symposium: Bodies of Knowledge: Gender, Sex, Science, and Medicine.
January 2023: Montreal Benesch, Satchel Petty, Parker Scarpa, and Kara Becker. Uptalk, persona, and perceived sexuality: A matched guise study [Poster]. American Dialect Society Annual Meeting. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.32189.54248.
October 2022: Montreal Benesch, Satchel Petty, Parker Scarpa, and Kara Becker. Exploring the indexical field of uptalk in a matched-guise study: One variable, many personae. New Ways of Analyzing Variation 50.
My first real experience in linguistics research was working with Kara Becker on her Spencer Foundation Grant-funded research on youth-based linguistic discrimination in higher education. The brunt of my work for the project centered around creating a (four variable, four speaker) matched guise experiment, though I also supported fellow research assistant Mary Teaford in creating the Linguistic Diversity Ambassador position at Reed and acted as lab manager, overseeing analysis of the matched guise experiment.
Presentations:
January 2023: Kara Becker, He Bai, Montreal Benesch, Leo Latimer, Satchel Petty, and Parker Scarpa. Observin’, like, youth-based linguistic discrimination in American higher education. American Dialect Society Annual Meeting.
I have a background in R and enjoy doing stats, so when the opportunity arose to do some consulting, I took it! I also have a bit of a background in Austronesian languages from my years studying with Matt Pearson at Reed.
Publications:
Accepted, in revisions: Emily Gasser and Montreal Benesch. An un-Austronesian Austronesian language: Proto-Yapen and its lexicon. NUSA: Linguistic studies of languages in and around Indonesia.