Professional History
Associate Professor
Sep 2018 - present
New York University, NY, Department of Anthropology
Visiting Professor
May 2015 - June 2015
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, Departments of South Asian Studies/Linguistics
Assistant Professor
Sep 2011 - May 2018
New York University, NY, Department of Anthropology
Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow
Sep 2010 - May 2011
New York University, NY, Department of Anthropology
Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow
Sep 2008 - May 2010
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Department of Anthropology
Research on policing funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation
Fellowships
2018-2020
Rare Book School - Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography
2018-2021
National Science Foundation Senior Research Award
2019-2020
Wenner-Gren Foundation Post-Ph.D. Research Grant
Learning about ornamental fonts at the Rare Book School in Charlottesville, VA
Publications
Books
Das, Sonia N. 2016. Linguistic Rivalries: Tamil Migrants and Anglo-Franco Conflicts. New York: Oxford University Press.
Journal Articles
Under review. Das, Sonia, Sherina Feliciano-Santos, and Hyemin Lee. "Racial Optics of Escalation."Current Anthropology.
Das, Sonia. 2020. “Transliteration Across Cities: The Interdiscursive Ethnohistory of a Tamil Francophonie.” Special issue, Script in South Asia: New Media and Semiotic Mediation, Signs and Society 8(1): 125-154.
Das, Sonia. 2019. “The Unsociability of Commercial Seafaring: Language Practice and Ideology in Maritime Technocracy." American Anthropologist 12(1): 62-75.
Das, Sonia. 2017. “Failed Legacies of Colonial Linguistics: Lessons from Tamil Books in French India and French Guiana” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59(4): 846-883.
Das, Sonia. 2015. “Une division sociale du travail linguistique: Enseigner le tamoul comme langue d’origine à Montréal, Québec.” Anthropologie et Sociétés 39(3): 153-172.
Das, Sonia. 2012. “La Francophonie and Other Contact Zones: Revisiting the Comparative Study of Linguistic Minorities.”Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 22(3): 220-236.
Das, Sonia. 2011. “Rewriting the Past and Reimagining the Future: The Social Life of a Tamil Heritage Language Industry.”American Ethnologist 38(4): 774-789.
Das, Sonia. 2008. “Between Convergence and Divergence: Reformatting Language Purism in the Montréal Tamil Diasporas”Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 18(1): 1-23.
Das, Sonia. 2008. “The Talk of Tamils in Multilingual Montreal: A Study of Intersecting Language Ideologies in Nationalist Quebec.”Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 8(2): 230-247.
Book Chapters
Under Review. Markkula, Johanna and Sonia Das. “Making the "Good Ship": Talk and the Political Economy of Social Justice at Sea.” Language and Social Justice: Global Perspectives. Kathleen Riley, Bernard Perley, and Inmaculada García-Sanchez, eds. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
n.d.. Das, Sonia. “Grant Writing for Projects in Linguistic Anthropology.” Research Methods in Linguistic Anthropology. Sabina Perrino and Sonya Pritzker, eds. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
Das, Sonia N. 2020. "Correctness, Incorrectness, and Correction." The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology. John Wiley & Sons. pg. 1-4.
Book Reviews
Das, Sonia. 2009. “Little India: Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius.” P. Eisenlohr. 2006. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19(2): 328-330.
Linguistic Rivalries
Tamil Migrants and Anglo-Franco Conflicts
"Linguistic Rivalries weaves together anthropological accounts of diaspora, nation, and empire to explore and analyze the multi-faceted processes of globalization characterizing the migration and social integration experiences of Tamil-speaking immigrants and refugees from India and Sri Lanka to Montréal, Québec in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries." (2016, Oxford University Press)
