Kira Hall

About

Kira Hall is a Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also holds affiliated faculty positions in The College of Media, Communication, and Information (CMCI) and the Department of Women and Gender Studies (WGST). She received her PhD in Linguistics in 1995 from the University of California, Berkeley, and has held faculty positions at Rutgers, Yale, Stanford, and the University of Colorado. Her research spans linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, with a focus on language and social identity in India and the United States, particularly concerning hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic class. Much of her work addresses the semiotic practices of communities associated with sexual alterity in India during accelerated globalization. Her recent research topics include language and sociality in autism, code switching and globalization, embodied sociolinguistics, language and media in cases of female mass hysteria in upstate New York, and the role of gesture in the entertainment appeal of presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Gender studies
• Philosophy
• Linguistics
• Law
• Epistemology
• Computer Science
• Aesthetics
• Thermodynamics

Selected publications

• The hands of Donald Trump

  Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory · 2016-09-01 · 253 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Commentators from a broad range of perspectives have been at pains to explain Donald Trump’s transition from billionaire businessman to populist presidential candidate. This article draws on cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and rhetorical theory to argue that the success of Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 Republican primary was in part due to its value as comedic entertainment. We examine the ways that Trump’s unconventional political style, particularly his use of gesture to critiq…

  PublisherDOI

• Postelection surrealism and nostalgic racism in the hands of Donald Trump

  Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory · 2017-03-01 · 139 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This article builds on interlocutor comments to “The Hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, Gesture, Spectacle” (Hall, Goldstein, and Ingram 2016), a study published before the 2016 presidential election that analyzes Trump’s use of derisive humor in the Republican Party primaries. We move this earlier analysis forward by examining the ways that Trump’s semiotic displays on the campaign trail now inform the material policies of the Trump administration. Our response reflects upon two currents tha…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Navigating normativities: Gender and sexuality in text and talk

  Language in Society · 2019-08-21 · 56 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This special issue was born out of a conversation initiated at a panel organized by two of us at the ninth biannual meeting of the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA), held at City University of Hong Kong in May 2016. The principal goal of the panel was to stimulate an academic discussion on the role of normativity and antinormativity in language, gender, and sexuality research in response to a series of critical interventions in cultural studies regarding some of the tenets un…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Middle class timelines: Ethnic humor and sexual modernity in Delhi

  Language in Society · 2019-08-21 · 48 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The rise of India's global economy has reinforced a perception of English as a language of sexual modernity within the expanding middle classes. This article explores this perception in the multilingual humor of Hindi-speaking Delhi youth marginalized for sexual and gender difference. Their joking routines feature the Sikh Sardarji, a longstanding ethnic figure often caricatured as circulating in modernity but lacking the English competence to understand modernity's semiotics. Reflectiv…

  PublisherDOI

• Feminist refusal meets enmity

  Gender and Language · 2020 · 23 citations

  Editorial. Social media has facilitated the rise of a new transnational feminism that refuses to accept silence surrounding violence against women. Often associated with the #MeToo movement, this form of feminist refusal continues to evolve as small-scale grassroots movements are transformed into global icons through the internet’s participatory power.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Mary Bucholtz

  University of Maryland, Baltimore County

  21 shared

• Donna M. Goldstein

  University of Colorado Boulder

  14 shared

• Rodrigo Borba

  12 shared

• Mie Hiramoto

  National University of Singapore

  12 shared

• Jenny L. Davis

  3 shared

• Matthew Bruce Ingram

  Dakota State University

  3 shared

• Anna Livia

  3 shared

• Tommaso M. Milani

  University of Gothenburg

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Linguistics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1995

Similar researchers at University of Colorado Boulder

• Bhuvana Narasimhanh-29
• Alexis Palmerh-21
• Chase Wesley Raymondh-21