CIRCE Seminar | Dr. Julia Swan | “Accent Bias Experienced by Instructors at Minority-Serving Institutions of Higher Education”
🎓 We are happy to announce the next and last webinar in the CIRCE online seminar series organized by the CIRCE project in collaboration with DFCLAM University of Siena, H2IOSC project and CNR-ILC.
Dr. Julia Swan
San José State University, USA
Accent Bias Experienced by Instructors at Minority-Serving Institutions of Higher Education
📅 December 15, 2025
🕓 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM (CEST)
Venue: Online
Attendees: Researchers, secondary school teachers, language instructors
Summary: Accent bias and linguistic discrimination shape outcomes in housing, the legal system, hiring, and higher education, where students’ perceptions of instructor accents strongly influence teaching evaluations and disproportionately disadvantage faculty with non-native or non-standard accents. This study examines faculty at three minority-serving Bay Area universities, comparing native English speakers, early bilinguals, and non-native speakers through survey data on belonging and linguistic bias. While non-native and early bilingual faculty reported similar levels of collegial support as native speakers, non-native speakers felt significantly more self-conscious about their accents, perceived their accents as hindering professional potential, and were less likely to see their accents as advantageous. Both non-native speakers and early bilinguals believed their accents negatively influenced evaluations from students and peers, and early bilinguals anticipated that newcomers with similar accents would struggle to adjust. These findings highlight the need for accent-bias training in faculty recruitment, evaluation, and promotion to enhance faculty diversity and reduce educational inequities.
Bio: Julia Swan is a sociolinguist interested in topics related to language and social identity. She has made broad contributions to American dialectology and sound change in the Western U.S. Her current projects investigate the role of multilingual speakers, often immigrants and their children, as leaders of sound change in the emergence of regional dialects. In other collaborations, she has explored cognitive aspects of processing “accented” speech, the role of perception in sound change, and individuals’ experiences of accent bias.
Register at the seminar registration page.