I’m proud of what I accomplished this year in research, teaching, and service.
Research
My article, “When I Was a Swahili Woman: The Possibilities and Perils of ‘Going Native’ in a Culture of Secrecy.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 48 (5): 674–99, which had been available online only in 2018, appeared in print in 2019.  https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241618811535.

Throughout the year, I continued working on my book manuscript on language and community among nonconformist Muslims in North America and online, with two more fieldwork trips to Toronto in June and September and one to San Francisco in December. UW-Madison nominated me for a Summer NEH fellowship to continue work on it in 2020.

I attended the American Association for Applied Linguistics in Atlanta in March, where I chaired and served as discussant on a panel on  “Expanding Queerness: Developing Queer Practices for Language Teaching,” which I had co-organized with James Coda. I also got to hang out with former student Uju Anya and got to know Leslie Moore over lunch. 

In April I gave an invited talk at the University of Kentucky. Later the paper I presented there served as the basis for an article accepted for publication in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. An early view of “Becoming Muslims with a ‘Queer Voice’: Indexical Disjuncture in the Talk of LGBT Members of the Progressive Muslim Community.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology is now out at https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12256.

In October I presented on the symbolic violence of ideological erasure of LGBTQ Muslims for the History department here.

I presented my research on queer language socialization among nonconformist Muslims at the American Anthropological Association in Vancouver in November and heard a lot of other great papers in linguistic anthropology.

Finally, I had an article accepted in the new Journal of Autoethnography and another in American Anthropologist. Look for those in 2020!

Teaching

In both Spring and Fall 2019, I taught my Critical Applied Linguistics (CALx) Working Group course for my doctoral advisees.

Two of them, Kazeem Sanuth and Adeola Agoke, finished up in Spring and Summer respectively. Dr. Kazeem Sanuth is now working in outreach at Indiana University, and my department hired Dr. Adeola Agoke to serve as Acting Director of the African Languages Program while I continue to chair the department.

This semester I taught my Literary Ethnography seminar for a second time, this time cross-listed with Anthropology, which resulted double the number of students. I had 13 students from diverse departments—not just African Cultural Studies and Anthropology but also Sociology, Environmental Studies, and Curriculum & Instruction. The result was fantastic; I think they learned as much from one another and I from them as they did from me.

Service

In Spring 2019 I ran a successful search in my department and ended up hiring a wonderful new colleague, Jacqueline Bethel-Mougoué.

In February, I visited the University of Maryland’s Arabic Flagship program to get ideas about how to incorporate Arabic dialects into our program.

Since September, I’ve been taking part in the Big Ten Academic Alliance Academic Leadership Program, participating in monthly lunches with UW-Madison leaders and quarterly seminars at other Big Ten institutions. In October our first seminar took place at Michigan State University, focused on Contemporary Issues in Higher Education.

In October, I attended the annual meeting of the National Association of Self-Instructional Language Programs, my final meeting as a board member, in Birmingham, Alabama.

Finally, I continued chairing the Department of African Cultural Studies at the UW-Madison, work I’ve enjoyed.