Dr. Luna Filipovic Hawkins

Luna Filipović Hawkins (PhD Cantab) is a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Linguistics, University of California Davis. Her PhD was in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, funded by a Leventis Foundation scholarship and Cambridge Overseas Trust grant. She then held two postdoctoral fellowships, one in psycholinguistics at the Department of Psychology, University College London, sponsored by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and one in linguistics in the Department of Linguistics, Cambridge, supported by the Leverhulme Trust and Newton Trust. She held the Professorship of Language and Cognition at the University of East Anglia from 2011 until last year, 2022. She has published 8 books (3 authored and 5 edited) and numerous journal articles and peer-reviewed book chapters. Her specialisation is in forensic linguistics, experimental psycholinguistics, and bilingualism. Her most recent monograph Bilingualism in Action: Theory and Practice was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. Recent research examines language effects on memory and on the description and translation of witnessed events. Luna has conducted experiments showing how a specific language spoken by a witness or suspect can affect the quantity and quality of information given and remembered, and how, why and when this information can be distorted in translation, impacting witness memory and jury judgments. She has advised the UK Government on the integration of randomised control trials in policy-making through her role as a select member of the Cross-Whitehall Expert Advisory Panel. She has studied multilingual police interviews in both the UK and the US for 20 years and discovered important problems in police communication and police interpreting. She leads a multidisciplinary international project TACIT – Translation and Communication in Training (www.tacit.org.uk), which feeds the latest research findings on bilingualism, witness memory and communication into training materials for police officers, language professionals and university educators, in England, Spain and the United States.