Edward Sapir Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistic Anthropology; Professor Emerita, Anthropology
About
Judith T. Irvine is Edward Sapir Distinguished University Professor of Linguistic Anthropology Emerita at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on language and communication in social, cultural, and historical contexts. She has done ethnographic, linguistic, and sociolinguistic fieldwork in Africa; research on the colonial history of African linguistics; and theoretical work on ideologies of language. Her main ethnographic and sociolinguistic fieldwork has been in Senegal, but more recently she has worked in South Africa. Her linguistic research has mainly concerned honorific expressions, especially in the Bantu language family. Her research on the early colonial history of Africanist linguistics and ethnography has focused on Senegambia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and South Africa, in the context of global and local histories, theoretical developments in the study of language at the time, and research approaches that were continent-wide.
