Rachel Emerine Hicks

Rachel D. Emerine Hicks

Rachel Hicks is a Ph.D. student in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego with academic interests related to education, language endangerment, language ideology, and the Pacific Islands.  She received her B.A. in Anthropology and Intercultural Studies with a minor in Applied Linguistics from Biola University in 2007 followed by an MA in Anthropology from California State University, Long Beach in 2009.  For her MA thesis at CSULB, she conducted fieldwork in the Solomon Islands studying the causes for endangerment of a small language called Engdewu on the island of Santa Cruz. 

Building on her MA research, Rachel returned to the Solomon Islands in 2018-2019 to study how rural-to-urban migration for schooling affects students' connections to their home communities, cultural values, and indigenous languages in the Solomon Islands.  

In her free time, if that exists in graduate school, Rachel enjoys running, hiking, reading a good book, and discovering new places and delicious food while traveling.