Troy E. Spier

Dr. Troy E. Spier is an Assistant Professor of English and Linguistics at Florida A&M University, affiliated with the Department of English and Modern Languages within the College of Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities (CSSAH). His primary research focuses on language documentation and description in East and East-Central Africa, particularly in Zambia, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. He also explores discourse analytic approaches to intersections of language, power, ideology, and religion, alongside interests in linguistic landscapes, computational methods, and pedagogy. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Arusha Working Papers in African Linguistics and has contributed to journals such as Discourse & Society, Journal of Asian and African Studies, and Language. Text. Society.

Dr. Spier holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Tulane University (2020), an M.A. in Linguistics (2018), and a B.S. Ed. in English Education from Kutztown University (2014). His teaching responsibilities include courses like Freshman Communicative Skills, Advanced Composition, and History of the English Language. He has also worked on digitizing literary works from the Post-Bellum era (1877–1917), available on his personal website.

His research spans diverse regions, including extended fieldwork in Arusha (Tanzania) and Mansa (Zambia), and he has lived in multiple countries such as Germany, Macedonia, and Ecuador. His scholarship bridges sociopolitical discourse analysis with linguistic documentation, emphasizing under-resourced languages and cultural contexts. He frequently employs corpus linguistics techniques to examine media representation, religious ideologies, and educational practices.

Recent work includes studies on Ecuadorian journalism’s portrayal of Muslims, linguistic landscapes in Pennsylvania, and the state of linguistics education in U.S. colleges. He actively contributes to interdisciplinary dialogues through pedagogical innovations and collaborative projects in African linguistic studies.