About me

A person holding a lit poi in each hand. They're looking down towards them and lit by the glow. They're wearing a black t-shirt and blue jeans. The background is dark except for a thin string of lights.

Like so many sociolinguists, I grew up in New Jersey. After graduating high school, I moved to Waterloo, Belgium for a year, and then to Portland, Oregon for undergrad. I more or less lived in Portland until fall of 2024, when I moved to Southern California to start at UCSB.

I enjoy cooking, reading, art, animals, music, social dancing, and, as you can see pictured, fire flow arts (primarily poi and dragon staff).

I have a former life as a Supervisor and Senior Reactor Operator at the Reed Research Reactor, where I also oversaw the training program 2020-2022.

↓ Keep scrolling for my academic bio ↓

Current academic bio:

Mg. Montreal Benesch is a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They are a sociophonetician and linguistic anthropologist specializing in participant-centered methods, creative expression, and embodiment within queer and trans communities. They have written about how genderfluid individuals use language as a semiotic resource to construct their genders (e.g., Benesch 2025), neoliberalism and non-binary representation in modern television (Benesch & Bedin 2025), the structure of the indexical field as it relates to sociophonetic perception (Becker et al. 2026), and the importance of participatory methodologies for sociophonetic research (Zimman et al. under review). Their work exemplifies their commitment to expanding linguistics and related fields through innovative, interdisciplinary, and liberatory approaches.

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