Nicole Holliday
Nicole Holliday is an American linguist who studies how language varies as people form their identities. She earned a PhD in linguistics from New York University in 2016, advised by Renée A. Blake. Her dissertation was called Intonational Variation, Linguistic Style, and the Black/Biracial Experience, focusing on voice, style, and race.
She was an assistant professor at Pomona College from 2017 to 2024 and briefly taught at the University of Pennsylvania in 2020. Since 2024, she has been an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Holliday’s research looks at how language variation relates to identity and how political speech intersects with identity. She has analyzed the speech patterns of politicians such as Barack Obama and Kamala Harris. More recently, she has worked on speech technologies and bias related to language variation.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 14:35 (CET).