Alison Mackey has served as Georgetown’s Vice President for Graduate Studies since July 2026.
She is a professor of linguistics and former chair of the Department of Linguistics. An interdisciplinary scholar, she researches how second languages are learned and how they might best be taught.
She investigates second language learning across the lifespan, including how additional languages are learned at different ages, looking at both younger and older children, as well as college age, prime-of-life, and elderly adults. One of her primary research interests is qualitative, quantitative and mixed research methodology.
In more recent work, she has begun investigating metaphor, naming and AI in medical discourse. She has published over 100 articles across all of the top scholarly journals in linguistics, as well as in edited collections by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, John Benjamins and others.
She has published 22 books in total, three of which deal with researching children’s language learning and teaching. Her Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, with Sue Gass, won the Modern Language Association’s Mildenberger Prize (2012). She was Editor-in-Chief of Cambridge University Press’s Annual Review of Applied Linguistics from 2013-2024 and is Editor of the Routledge book series Second Language Research.
Google Scholar shows Mackey’s work has been cited close to 40,000 times in the academic literature. Her h-index is 72 and her i10 is 135. She is consistently one of the highest cited scholars in the world in her research areas. She is also a winner of the American Association for Applied Linguistics’ Distinguished Scholarship and Service Award (2022), the International Association of Task-based Language Learning and Teaching’s Distinguished Achievement Award (2023) as well as Georgetown’s top awards, the Provost’s Career Research Achievement Award and the President’s Award for Distinguished Scholar-Teachers, 2019. She has also won the Modern Language Association’s Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize (2012). Her most recent recognition was from Georgetown’s College of Arts and Sciences and the 2025 Condé Nast Award for Distinguished Teaching, Research and Service.