Brenna Byrd

Brenna Reinhart Byrd is an Assistant Professor of German in the Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures Department at the University of Kentucky. She received her PhD in Germanic Linguistics from UCLA in 2010 and has been working at the University of Kentucky since then as Director of Beginning German, overseeing the curriculum and training of instructors for the first three semesters of German. Her research interests include SLA literacy, sociolinguistics, Turkish-German identity, Hip Hop studies, computer-mediated communication, constructed languages, and historical linguistics. At the University of Kentucky, she regularly teaches classes on language pedagogy, linguistics, older Germanic dialects, and Germanic Mythology. She also worked with her husband and fellow linguist, Andrew Byrd, to create languages based off of Proto-Indo-European for an internationally successful video game, Far Cry: Primal, which they both hope to use to increase global interest in linguistics and languages in general.