Highly accomplished in her respective field, Tina L. Bennett-Kastor, PhD, is now retired from a tenured position at Wichita State University after 38 years on campus. Acquired in 1978 as an assistant professor, she later made full professor between 1998 and 2016. Teaching various courses such as the history of English, she also taught dialectology, language and culture, Irish American literature, the Bible as literature and more. Some of Dr. Bennett-Kastor’s other noteworthy roles at the university included serving as the director of the Master of Arts in liberal studies program and as the interim writing program director.
Leveraging her expertise, Dr. Bennett-Kastor spent time abroad as a visiting scholar at the Linguistics Institute of Ireland in Dublin in 1995, where she conducted research on narrative structure in Irish speaking children. She also studied structural differences between bilingual adults. Earlier in her career, she was a research consultant for the rehabilitation center at the University of California Los Angeles and a humanities consultant for Children’s Audio Services in Columbia, South Carolina.
A prolific writer, Dr. Bennett-Kastor first edited “Discourse Across Time and Space” in 1977. She later authored “Analyzing Children’s Language” in 1988 and “Multiliterate Ireland: Literacy Manifestations of a Multilingual History” in 2015. Additionally, she contributed a chapter in the book “Repetition in Discourse” in 1995; authored and co-authored numerous articles in various peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Child Language and the Journal of College Reading and Learning; and was an editorial consultant for Language, Speech and Hearing Services in the Schools between 1998 and 2001.
Dr. Bennett-Kastor has been involved with her local community as the former president of Little Red Wagon Child Care in Wichita, Kansas, former vice-president and co-president of the Celtic Circle and the Irish American Cultural Institute in Wichita, and former member of the athletic board of directors of the Wichita State University Intercollegiate Athletic Association from 2008 to 2010. She actively served as the vice president of the Wichita Irish Cultural Association, and teaches beginning Irish Gaelic within her community now and then. To support her career, Dr. Bennett-Kastor has been an active member of several professional organizations, including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the Linguistic Society of America and the New York Academy of Science.
Dr. Bennett-Kastor prepared for her career by earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in humanities and writing at the California Institute of the Arts in 1973, followed by a Master of Arts and PhD in linguistics at the University of Southern California in 1976 and 1978, respectively. While pursuing a doctorate degree, she was a research associate at the John Tracy Clinic in Los Angeles during 1977. Funded by a grant, she conducted research on hearing impaired children’s acquisition of language.
As a testament to her success and longevity in the field, Dr. Bennett-Kastor has been named an honorary professor by Albert Schweitzer University, received a Quora Top Writer Award, was a finalist of an international songwriting contest and was a nominee for the Pushcart Prize. She also secured several research grants from Wichita State University between 1979 and 1999. A celebrated Marquis listee, Dr. Bennett-Kastor has been featured in several editions of Who’s Who, including Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in American Education.