Dr. Otundo is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence - Englische Sprachwissenschaft at the University of Bayreuth, where she attained her doctorate as a Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS) fellow. Her doctoral dissertation (Otundo 2018) focused on ethnically-marked varieties of Kenyan English(es).

In 2019, Otundo was working as a lecturer of linguistics at Moi University. In the same year, she was awarded funding by NWO-WOTRO, Science for Global Development as a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University in The Netherlands on a collaborative project with Leiden University (The Netherlands) and Moi University. Here, she researched public narratives utilised by Kenyan community-based organisations advocating for land rights (e.g., Otundo et.al 2018, 2019, 2022).After this, Otundo was a research fellow at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, University of Bayreuth investigating student teachers’ attitudes toward translanguaging in learning spaces vis-à-vis social life (forthc.).

In 2021, she was funded by The World Academy of Sciences for the Advancement of Science in Developing Countries (TWAS-DFG) as a cooperation researcher at the University of Cologne, where she investigated intonation in advice-giving in Kenyan English and Kiswahili (e.g, Otundo & Grice 2022).

Otundo is well-networked internationally through numerous conference visits in European and African countries and has since engaged in publications on new research topics, among them also a joint project with the University of Bayreuth on code-switching in the speech activity of advice analysing radio phone-in programmes in Kenya and Cameroon (Otundo & Mühleisen 2022). Yet another new research topic is within the decolonisation of higher education in Africa where she reflects together with a colleague at Collège Montmorency in Canada, on the paradoxes around the imaginations of the African reader-writer who uses borrowed ex-colonial European languages (Otundo & Dodonou 2021). On education matters, she has also recently addressed the barriers to implementing the Education Article of the United Nations Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities in Kenya (Otundo 2022).

As a researcher, Otundo has engaged a mix of quantitative and qualitative data and is experienced in analysis with Praat, SPSS, R-Programming, and MAXQDA among others. Her main research interest is in multilingualism, sociolinguistics, prosody, and education in sub-Saharan Africa.