Susan Berk-Seligson Bio

Susan Berk-Seligson: Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Vanderbilt University. Previously, she was on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh for nineteen years. Berk-Seligson is author of the award-winning book, The Bilingual Courtroom: Court Interpreters in the Judicial Process (The University of Chicago Press 1990, 2002) and the author of numerous scholarly articles that have been published in such refereed journals as The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law (formerly called Forensic Linguistics), Language in Society, The Journal of Pragmatics, The International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Lingua, Multilingual, Linguistics, and Latin American Research Review, and Interpreting: International Journal of Research and Practice in Interpreting.  She is on the editorial/consulting boards of six scholarly linguistic journals. Her most recent book is Coerced Confessions: The Discourse of Bilingual Police Interrogations, 2009, published by Mouton de Gruyter.  She is currently working on a book-length manuscript on justice systems in contact, focusing on the Quichua native peoples of Ecuador.  At the same time, she is heading a research project in Guatemala, El Salvador and Panama, involving interviews with community stakeholders on the status of gang-related violence prevention efforts currently underway in their communities. Berk-Seligson’s academic specializations are sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and forensic linguistics.  Within the field of forensic linguistics she has specialized in issues involving Limited English Speakers in the U.S.A., particularly with regard to legal interpreting issues