Karen L. Adams is director of graduate studies in the Department of English. Her interests are in the study of language in its social and linguistic context. She came to ASU in 1984 and has also been affiliated with the Center for Asian Research and was a co-Principal Investigator on a Department of Education Title VI NRC grant and the PI on a Title VI UISFL grant. She has authored and co-authored articles in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language Sciences, Journal of Language and Social Psychology and Pragmatics. She has co-edited volumes on Southeast Asian linguistics and on English language policy and has a monograph with Pacific Linguistics, Australian National University. She also has several refereed book chapters in volumes from Palgrave Macmillan, John Benjamins and University of Toronto Press. Her research areas are sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis.