Michele Koven

Assistant Professor

Education: Ph.D., University of Chicago

Research Interests: The role of culture in verbal interaction; how speakers perform and infer cultural identities in their own and others' talk; style shifting and code switching in discourse; bilingualism; intercultural communication; sociolinguistics; oral narrative

Current Research: Professor Koven is involved in a long term ethnographic project which addresses the relationships between identity and language practices of the Portuguese migrant community in France. She is currently working on a book about how these bilingual speakers enact multiple, culturally situated identities in talk. She is also involved in a related project focusing on how speakers tell the “same” stories of personal experience in multiple contexts.

Representative Recent Publications:

Koven, M. (2004b). Getting "Emotional" in Two Languages: Bilinguals' Verbal Performance of Affect in Narratives of Personal Experience. Text, 24(4), 471-515.

Koven, M. (2004a) Transnational Perspectives on Sociolinguistic Capital among Luso-descendants in France and Portugal. American Ethnologist, 31(2), 270-290.

Koven, M. (2002). An Analysis of Speaker Role Inhabitance in Narratives of Personal Experience. The Journal of Pragmatics, 34(2), 167-217.

Koven, M. (2001). Comparing Bilinguals' Quoted Performances of Self and Others in Tellings of the Same Experience in Two Languages. Language in Society, 30, 513-558.

Koven, M. (1998). Two languages in the self /The self in two languages: French and Portuguese bilinguals’ verbal enactments and experiences of self in narrative discourse. Ethos, 26(4), 410-455.