Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Yesterday on this blog, the posting “LSA news bulletin: awards” on (among other things)

Kira Hall — of the University of Colorado, Boulder — as the 5th recipient of the … Arnold Zwicky Award, intended to recognize LGBTQ+ scholars and those whose work in linguistics benefits the LGBTQ+ community.

Now, some basic information about KH, from Wikipedia and from the University of Colorado website; I might add some further information about her in a while.

From Wikipedia:

Kira Hall is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology, as well as director for the Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice (CLASP), at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The majority of Hall’s work focuses on language in India and the United States, with special attention to organizations of gender and sexuality. A special focus of her work has been the linguistic and sociocultural practices of Hindi-speaking Hijras in northern India, a nonbinary group often discussed in the anthropological literature as a “third sex.”

She is known for her contributions to research on language and identity within sociocultural linguistics, and especially the tactics of intersubjectivity framework developed with Mary Bucholtz [of UC Santa Barbara].

From the Colorado site:

her research focuses on language and social identity in India and the United States, particularly with respect to hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic class. Much of this ongoing work addresses the semiotic practices of communities associated with sexual alterity in India during accelerated globalization. Her recent work has turned to diverse topics that include language and sociality in autism, code switching and globalization, embodied sociolinguistics, language and media in an alleged case of female mass hysteria in upstate New York, and the role of gesture in the entertainment appeal of presidential candidate Donald Trump.

This entry was posted on October 28, 2025 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Anthropology, Awards, Gender and sexuality, Linguists, Sociolinguistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.