Anne Harper Charity Hudley is Assistant Professor of English, Linguistics, and Africana Studies and the William and the inaugural William and Mary Professor of Community Studies at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Her research and publications address the relationship between language variation and Pre K-16 educational practices and policies.

Her book Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools, co-authored with Christine Mallinson of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, is published by Teachers College Press in the Multicultural Studies Series.

Her other publications appear in journals including Child Development, Language Variation and Change, American Speech, Language and Linguistics Compass, Perspectives on Communication Disorders and Sciences in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Populations, and in several book collections including the Handbook of African-American Psychology, Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Literacy Education and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics.

Charity Hudley has served as a consultant to the National Research Council Committee on Language and Education and to the National Science Foundation’s Committee on Broadening Participation in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Sciences. She serves on editorial board of the Sociolinguistics division of Language and Linguistics Compass and on the Linguistic Society of America Committee on Linguistics in Higher Education as an undergraduate program representative and the chair of the subcommittee on diversity. She works with K-12 teachers through lectures and workshops sponsored by public, and independent schools throughout the country as well as by the American Federation of Teachers. She is working with William and Mary’s administration to create a new Dean’s Scholars Program that is being designed to increase research opportunities for minority, first generation and lower-income students. The program will also serve students with physical disabilities or who have experienced exceptional hardship or adversity.

Dr. Charity Hudley is a native of Richmond, Virginia and attended St. Catherine’s School for 13 years. She earned both a BA and a MA in Linguistics from Harvard University in 1998. She was awarded a Ford Foundation Pre-Dissertation Fellowship in 2003. From 2003-2005, she was the Thurgood Marshall Dissertation Fellow in residence at Dartmouth College. She earned a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005. She received a National Science Foundation Minority Postdoctoral Fellowship in Fall 2005 and a National Science Foundation Minority Research Starter Grant in 2009 to create workshops on language variation for educators. She was the 2009 College of William and Mary nominee for the Virginia State Council of Higher Education Outstanding Faculty Award in the Rising Star category. The William and Mary chapter of the NAACP and the Student Assembly Department of Diversity Initiatives awarded her the 2010 William and Mary Image Award as the individual who best embodies the spirit of a vibrant and diverse William and Mary community.