Sonia N. Das
Assistant Professor of AnthropologyPh.D. 2008, M.A. 2003, Michigan; B.S. and B.A. 1999, Stanford
Office Address: Rufus D. Smith Hall 25 Waverly Place New York, NY 10003
Email:
Phone: 212-992-7476
Fax: 212-995-4014
Areas of Research/Interest
linguistic anthropology, language ideology, heritage language education, urban multilingualism, political economy, francophone Quebec, diasporic/mobile South Asians
Publications
2011. Rewriting the Past and Reimagining the Future: The Social Life of a Tamil Heritage Language Industry.
American Ethnologist 38(4). In press.
2008. Between Convergence and Divergence: Reformatting Language Purism in the Montreal Tamil Diasporas.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 18(1):1-23.
2008. The Talk of Tamils in Multilingual Montreal: A Study of Intersecting Language Ideologies in Nationalist Quebec.
Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 8(2): 230-247.
Review of Little India: Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19(2): 328-330.
Current News/Projects
Updated August 2011
In 2010 I was hired as an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow and soon after rehired as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Linguistic Anthropology. Over the past year, I designed a new undergraduate course, Language and Identity, and taught the core undergraduate course, Anthropology of Language, and an interdisciplinary graduate seminar, Culture, Meaning, and Society. I also worked closely with my colleague, Bambi Schieffelin, to advise students in linguistic anthropology.
My latest article entitled “Rewriting the past and reimagining the future: The social life of a Tamil heritage language industry” will be published in American Ethnologist in November 2011. This article is part of a longer book manuscript that examines how different generational and migrant cohorts of Indian Tamils and Sri Lankan Tamils living in Montreal, Quebec work collaboratively and competitively to build an urban, multilingual diaspora that simultaneously pays tribute to the legacies of three linguistic nationalist movements. In March 2011 I was invited to give a talk on this research at Yale University’s Ethnography and Social Theory Colloquium.
Last summer I was elected as a core member of the Committee on Language and Social Justice, a joint task force of the SLA and AAA Committee on Human Rights, along with Ana Celia Zentella and H. Samy Alim. Working on behalf of the CLSJ, I co-organized an AAA panel with Lynnette Arnold to compare legacies of minority language activism and discrimination in Canada and the U.S. In an effort to encourage greater dialogue among faculty in anthropology and linguistics departments across North America, panelists will present their papers in one of three languages: French, English, Spanish.
In addition to working on my book manuscript, I am currently writing an article-length book review for the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and starting a new essay on the mid-19th century production and export of bilingual French-Tamil books from Pondicherry (French India) to Bordeaux (France), and Cayenne (French Guiana). Also, I am very excited about my upcoming research project on the multilingual practices of Indian seamen living and working aboard commercial cargo ships that dock at the ports of Montreal, New York, and Calcutta. This summer I’m working with a Hindi tutor and watching lots of Hindi movies to improve my conversational skills in this language.
