Who the #$%@ am I?

I'm Dr Karen Stollznow, a linguist and writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’ve spent many years investigating pseudoscientific and paranormal phenomena, including: ghosts, aura reading, psychics, medical intuitives, alternative therapies, mediums, faith healing, conspiracy theories, cults, pareidolia (seeing faces on places other than heads), religion, haunted houses, and much more. I research these topics, road test the theories and report my experiences.

As a linguist, one of my specialties is language-based phenomena (an emerging area I would call skeptical linguistics), such as glossolalia (speaking in tongues), automatic writing, body language, graphology, alien and monster languages and writing systems, electronic voice phenomena, codes, cold reading, speed reading, fringe theories and bad thinking about language.

I am a Director of the Bay Area Skeptics, the San Francisco Bay Area's skeptical organization since 1982. I'm a committee member of CFI San Francisco and an insatiable writer for many sites and publications, including Skeptical Inquirer, the Bay Area Skeptic’s Blog, the James Randi Educational Foundation’s Swift, and Skepchick.

I write the Naked Skeptic web column for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

I’m also a co-host of the Monster Talk podcast, along with Ben Radford of Skeptical Inquirer, and the mysterious Doctor Atlantis, aka Blake Smith. In our show, science finally has a say about cryptozoology.

The Skepbitch is my beloved blog where I speak (type), unfettered and uncensored, about skepticism, science and society.

In a former life (who says skeptics can't be reincarnated?) I was the long-term Associate Editor and then Editor of The Skeptic, a magazine published by the Australian Skeptics. I began my life in skepticism as an investigator with this organization, and spent over a decade investigating a wide range of claims, beliefs and practices. In this capacity I wrote the Naked Skeptic column for Australasian Science.

However, I delight in working with people with opposing views, and am a frequent contributor to Haunted America Tours , and I'm always available for interviews and investigations with people from 'the other side'.

Somewhere underneath all of this skepticism, I'm a linguist. I earned my PhD through the University of New England (Australia), but spent my final years of candidature as a Visiting Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. I was fortunate to become a Research Associate for the Script Encoding Initiative, a Unicode project to research and encode the world's endangered writing systems.

My area of expertise is lexical semantics, and my related interests are pragmatics, sociolinguistics, lexicography, cognitive science and intercultural communication. My research interests include language and discrimination, taboo language, and dialects of English. I've taught semantics, applied linguistics, general linguistics and intercultural communication.

I currently work as a lecturer, researcher and consultant. I also have interests in scriptwriting, journalism, non-fiction, novels and travelogues. See here for a selection of articles, find others scattered around the site, and stick around for much more!