A warm welcome to Dr. Kimberly Vinall, who has just been appointed as the BLC’s new Executive Director after a wide-ranging search this summer. Kimberly is a Berkeley PhD (Language, Literacy, and Culture program within the Graduate School of Education) and has over two decades of experience in teaching Spanish, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, and education courses. She has coordinated language programs and has extensive experience in developing curricular materials, working with technology (developing hybrid and remote courses), and supervising faculty and graduate student instructors. Her research interests center broadly on applied linguistics, with the themes of language, power, identity, and community echoing throughout her work, from her research on border studies and symbolic competence to her reflections on service learning and mentoring students from diverse backgrounds. She is currently engaged in a research project on machine translation in language teaching (which she talked about in a BLC lecture and which is the topic of a forthcoming special issue of L2 Journal she is co-editing).
Kimberly is no stranger to the BLC, and has supported our mission over the years by being an actively engaged member of our community—as a BLC Fellow, as a participant in BLC activities such as Words in Action, BLC lectures, and reading groups, and as a co-editor of special issues and former Managing Editor of the L2 Journal. In sum, Kimberly is a perfect fit for the intellectual, pedagogical, and technological support for language teaching that the Executive Director provides.
My sincere thanks to my colleagues who served on the Search Committee—Gabriella Licata, Karen Moller, Frank Smith, Linda Von Hoene, Lydia Yoon, and Lihua Zhang—who invested a substantial portion of their summer to this search.