Teresa Satterfield is a Professor of Romance Linguistics in the University of Michigan’s (UM) Department of Romance Languages & Literatures and the Department of Linguistics. She is also a long-time faculty affiliate of UM’s Combined Program in Education and Psychology (CPEP). Satterfield’s areas of research span psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic frameworks to investigate child bilingual language and literacy development, heritage language speaker identity, and language contact/language change (with a focus on the Afro-Latino diaspora).

Satterfield has a productive grant history and strong publishing record in child bilingualism, specifically in the context of syntactic theory and computational models of bilingual language, contact and cognition. Satterfield was at the vanguard of scholars linking computational modeling with syntactic theory, and even more ambitiously, with bilingualism in her 1995 dissertation and book (Bilingual Selection of Syntactic Knowledge, 1999) and several subsequent publications. She has productive and ongoing collaborations in developmental cognitive neuroscience, which have resulted in numerous articles on language and literacy development in the bilingual brain and the use of brain imaging techniques. She views this research as complementary to her ongoing studies on bilingualism and identity (Arredondo, Rosado & Satterfield, 2016; Satterfield & Benkí, 2019; Regus & Satterfield, 2023; Méndez & Satterfield, 2024).

Satterfield currently serves on several editorial boards and is the President of the Board of Directors of Language Learning. She has recently served as Linguistic Society of America Chair of the Program Committee. Satterfield is the founder and director of the En Nuestra Lengua Literacy and Culture Project, a combined non-profit community-based Saturday Spanish-immersion literacy program for heritage speakers, service-learning experience andresearch network. En Nuestra Lengua has been in operation since 2010 and continues to address the significant academic achievement gap faced by US-born Spanish-speaking children in SE Michigan. Satterfield has been widely recognized for her social justice initiatives and activism to make cultural spaces more welcoming and linguistically accessible to families of color. She has recently collaborated in outreach projects and public scholarship with the UM Museum of Natural History, Matthaei Botanical Garden-Nichols Arboretum, UM Ginsberg Center and the Black & Brown Theater group.