Asif Agha Is President-Elect of Society for Linguistic Anthropology

Asif Agha, professor of anthropology, has been voted president-elect of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology (SLA), a section of the American Anthropological Association. The SLA is the premiere society for the interdisciplinary study of how language shapes social life in the world.

Agha’s research interests include linguistic and cultural anthropology, sociolinguistics, rhetoric, and language ideologies. He is also studying how the media may shape and frame the processes and discourse of political communication as well as the society in which that communication takes place, an idea called mediatization.

Agha is the author of the book Language and Social Relations, which received the SLA’s Edward Sapir Book Prize, awarded to the book “that makes the most significant contribution to our understanding of language in society, or the ways in which language mediates historical or contemporary sociocultural processes.” He guest-edited “Mediatized Communication in Complex Societies,” a special issue of Language and Communication, and “Discourse Across Speech Events: Intertextuality and Interdiscursivity in Social Life,” a special issue of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, the latter with Stanton Wortham, Judy and Howard Berkowitz Professor in Penn’s Graduate School of Education.

Agha is associate editor of the International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology. He is on the editorial board of Language and Communication and was on the editorial board of Language in Society from 2007-2013 He has also written more than 40 article and reviews, as well as dozens of papers and presentations. He earned his Ph.D. with distinction from the University of Chicago.