In the program’s inaugural year, the fellows and the program’s seminar series focused on how languages interact with political, social, economic, and cultural authority.  Languages can be powerful tools for expressing and asserting authority, yet they also constitute forms of authority in and of themselves (such as in the standardization and uniformity that they impose). Languages as forms of authority are also contested, and language communities have often formed a basis for resisting authority. Possible topics for this cycle included the ways in which languages and language use interact with globalization, empire, decolonization, nation-state formation, nationalism, language policy, language ideology, social stratification, migration, commerce and trade, social and religious movements, and the sociology of knowledge production.

Michael D. Gordin
Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History

Adam Clulow
Monash University in Melbourne, Australia

Helder De Schutter
Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Belgium

David E. Kiwuwa
University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China

Pritipuspa Mishra
University of Southampton, UK

Brigitte Rath
Universität Innsbruck, Austria

Ying Ying Tan
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore