Kendra Calhoun is a Ph.D. Candidate in Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Her research is in the interdisciplinary field of sociocultural linguistics and brings together theories and methods from fields including sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, communication and media studies, humor studies, Black Studies, and feminists studies. Calhoun critically analyzes the intersections of language, race, and power and explores how they take shape in face-to-face and multimodal online contexts.

In her online discourse research, she focuses on the linguistic and cultural practices of Black social media users in the U.S. She has researched Black discourse practices such as racial humor and digital activism on Vine, Tumblr, and Twitter. Her dissertation research analyzes diversity discourses in institutions of higher education in the U.S. She analyzes the rhetoric of institutional discourse at multiple institutions and how it compares to the lived experiences and understandings of diversity of graduate students of color.