A photo of a Kevin McGowan (right) and a corvid-shaped object

linguist, phonetician, nerd

I am an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Kentucky where I also direct the UK Phonetics Lab.

English with an Accent 3e

English with an Accent 3e

Rusty Barrett, Jennifer Cramer, and I had the great honor of revising Rosina Lippi-Green’s classic English with an Accent to bring it up to date with all of the research it has been so important in inspiring.

Jennifer Nycz described our new edition as the “updated-for-the-3rd-wave” edition of EWAA, adding that “third-wave” is [her] academic translation of how they explain it … clearly/accessibly and without jargon.” And I could not be more thrilled with this description!

The book’s website is here

About ‘Kevin Barry’

I’m named after a dance my mother choreographed for the Oireachtas Rince na Cruinne about a young fella who was somehow a medical student at a wizened 18 years of age and was executed by British occupying forces in 1920. The anglicization of the Irish name Caoimhín, ‘Kevin’ [’kʰɛ.vĩn] is, infamously, cognate with a German word meaning something like thug or, forgive me, chav.

About ‘McGowan’

Variously anglicized as Mc Gowan, MacGowan, Gowan, or even Smythe or Smith, my surname is from the Irish Mac Gabhann [mə’gɑ.wĩn] which, Mac indicating a son of Gabhann meaning blacksmith or smith. Similar anglicization happens with Mac an Gabhann and unrelated, but similar, names in Scotland such that `McGowan’ is an incredibly common name.

There’s a lot of us.

  • Kevin J. McGowan, crow expert, is my favorite other Kevin McGowan, but don’t tell that to
  • Kevin B. McGowan there are so many Kevin McGowans in the world that there is even another Kevin B McGowan who works on nasal stuff!
  • Kevin McGowan, baseball player, stole our wikipedia entry simply by being way more famous than the rest of us.
  • Kevin McGowan, drummer & also possibly musician?
  • Kevin McGowan, molecular genomics
  • Kevin P. McGowan statistical programmer, alas, is no longer with us.
  • There are more, a lot more, but you get the idea.