Education
• MA in TESOL – SIT Graduate Institute
• BA in World Languages and Cultures (Spanish, Turkish, Arabic) – Mercyhurst University

Biography
Emerson McMurray (they/them) is an ESL and EFL specialist and foreign language educator with expertise in the instruction of spoken English and academic writing. They are one of the founders and current editors of Translingual: The Journal of International Voices, IELP’s departmental journal. Emerson’s teaching in Turkey, Morocco, and China, as well as having been a foreign language student themselves in Turkey and Argentina, founded their pedagogical philosophies of empowering ELLs by preserving their cultural and linguistic identities in the acquired language. They believe that students must have ownership of English as an international language and that non-native English expression is beautiful in all its iterations. Emerson began working at OSU in 2021, before which they were ESL faculty at Cuyahoga Community College. Additionally, they served as Otterbein University’s ESL writing coordinator, where they founded The Howl, a student-lead publication. For Otterbein and SPPC Universities, they ran online content-based English language courses with subject matter like journalism, competitive debate, sociolinguistics, and American history. In addition to their other interests, Emerson is passionate about disability rights, with a special emphasis on accommodations for invisible and neurological disabilities in academic and professional settings, and they believe social justice, nonviolent communication, and conflict resolution hold a natural place in language learning content and environments. Please feel free to contact them in English, Spanish, or Turkish.