Our Team

Don E. Walicek is Assistant Professor of English in the College of General Studies. He holds a PhD in English linguistics from the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras. He earned both his BA (Anthropology) and his MA (Latin American Studies, with concentrations in Anthropology and History) from the University of Texas at Austin. His main fields of academic interest are sociolinguistics, sociohistorical linguistics, Creole studies, and language and gender.Dr. Walicek serves as the Editor of the Caribbean Studies journal Sargasso, which is published by the Department of English in the College of Humanities. He has edited the following volumes of the journal: Celebrating Caribbean Voices: 25 Interviews (2011), Explorations of Language, Gender, and Sexuality (with Dr. Susanne Mühleisen, 2010),Alternative Identities: Resistance and Belonging (2008), Caribbean Theatre and Cultural Performance (with Dr. Lowell Fiet and Sally Everson, 2005), and Creolistics and Caribbean Languages (2005).Dr. Walicek's other publications include articles focusing on the social life of language in Caribbean contexts. Several deal with issues of language and sociohistory as they relate to Anguilla, the most northerly of the Leeward Islands; these include "Trajectories of Cultural Feedback: Alan Lomax in 1962 Anguilla" (University of Curaçao, 2011), "Christianity, Literacy, and Creolization in Nineteenth-Century Anguilla" (University of Curaçao, 2011), "The Founder Principle and Anguilla's Homestead Society" (John Benjamins 2009), and "Focusing in Context: Slavery and Vernacular Norms in Eighteenth-Century Anguilla" (La Torre, 2009). He is also the author of the chapters "Chinese Spanish in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: Documenting Sociohistorical Context" (John Benjamins, 2007), and "Farther South: Speaking American, the Language of Migration in Samaná" (U of Virginia, 2007).Currently he is writing a book about language and social life in Anguilla. He is also working with Dr. Manfred Krug (Bamberg University, Germany) on a language documentation project that focuses on the use of English in Puerto Rico.