looking for a phd program

[Lucinda Mcdonald]

Hello ADS list members,

I am graduate student at York University in Toronto, Canada working on my MA.
I hope to enter a Ph.D. program next year and am searching for potential
schools in Canada, the US or the UK.

My area of interest is techological neologisms, that is, new words to do with
computers and the internet. I am intrigued by the idea of English language as
a cultural artifact that can be studied by watching what new words are coined
and stick in our vocabulary and relating them back to the social factors that
instigated these changes. My MA thesis involves looking at technological
neologisms that start with e- such as e-mail, e-commerce, e-text, etc. For my
PhD I want to look at how some new techy words are replacing existing words,
for instance using "downtime" instead of "free time".

Does anyone have recommedations for schools in Canada, the US or the UK (or
possibly Australia or New Zealand) that would be open to this type of
research? My own searching so far has found that this topic area doesn't
really have a standard academic home as it is in the borderlands between
communications, cultural studies, linguistics and english (and possibly
others?). Also, I'm a bit limited by the fact that I don't have a linguistics
undergraduate degree or MA so don't seem to be qualified to apply to
linguistics programs proper.

Any advice on potential Ph.D. programs that look at language from a cultural
perspective would be very much appreciated.

Thanks!
Lucinda McDonald
MA student
Communication and Culture Program
York University
Toronto, Ontario, Canada