Ryan Shaw-Hawkins studied English Language and Linguistics at the University of Glasgow, Scotland (2016-2020), before completing a master’s degree in Sociolinguistics at Queen Mary, University of London (2021-2022). They completed their ESRC and Scottish Graduate School of Social Sciences-funded PhD at the University of Glasgow, University of Edinburgh and Queen Margaret University where they investigated nonbinary people and their speech, paying particular focus to anti-essentialist methods of data collection and experimental design (2022-2026). They focused on contextually-situated intraspeaker variation, combining acoustic analysis, discourse analysis, and articulatory analysis using ultrasound tongue imaging. Since September 2026 they hold the post of post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at Universität Bern where they are a researcher on the Census of Urban and Rural Dialects of England and Wales and a Lecturer in the English department. They are a co-author of a forthcoming book titled Resisting Essentialism in Quantitative Language, Gender and Identity Research: Counting Us In (Palgrave MacMillan) and a co-author of a chapter in the forthcoming Cambridge Handbook of Queer Linguistics (Cambridge University Press).
