Robert Xu

Robert Xu is a Lecturer of Linguistics at Harvard University and has accepted a position as Visiting Assistant Professor at Oberlin College starting this fall. His research focuses on sociolinguistics, phonetics, and linguistic anthropology, with a particular interest in speech prosody and its role in social interaction. He holds a PhD from Stanford University, where his dissertation examined embodied linguistic styles in Beijing, supervised by Penny Eckert and Rob Podesva.

His methodologies include experimental studies, fieldwork, interviews, and corpus analysis, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. His work on prosody began in Hong Kong under Peggy Mok's mentorship, exploring pitch, timing, and voice quality as dynamic elements of linguistic meaning-making. Xu's research addresses questions about social reality construction and the dialogic nature of sociolinguistic styles.