Avital Karpman (PhD, York) researches the connections between language acquisition and identity development, particularly in heritage language communities. She studies how factors such as religious, national, and ethnic identities fluctuate and change to influence language-learning motivations and group socialization. She is the author of Who Does This Language Belong To? Personal Narratives of Language Claim and Identity (Information Age Publishing, 2008) and is an editor of Issues in the Acquisition and Teaching of Hebrew (University Press of Maryland, 2009). She was a recipient of a four-year U.S. Department of Education grant to write an advanced Hebrew textbook.