Cynthia Groff earned her Ph.D. in Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. Her research on language policy and ideology focuses on adequacy of education for linguistic minorities and the experiences and discourses of minority youth related to language and belonging. For her dissertation work in North India, she received the Comparative and International Education Society’s Language Issues Dissertation Award, the University of Pennsylvania’s Educational Linguistics International Award, the American Association of University Women’s Dissertation Fellowship, and four Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships. Her dissertation-based book is entitled The ecology of language in multilingual India: Voices of women and educators in the Himalayan foothills. Through post-doctoral research at Université Laval in Québec, she again interviewed minority youth, analyzing discourses and identity choices within their linguistic and educational context. In affiliation with Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico, she conducted research at rural Purhepecha-Spanish bilingual schools, for which she was awarded the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. As a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at Leiden University, Cynthia focused on discourses about cultural and linguistic diversity in urban high schools in an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods project entitled “Voices of belonging: Minority identities, language and education in the Netherlands.”

As a guest researcher at NL-Lab, Cynthia is writing a funding application for an NWO VIDI project with the provisional title “Language diversity and identity formation in education: Ideology implications and policy innovations across contexts”. In addition, she is working on research publications based on past and current projects, expanding her network and exploring further research collaborations.