Sabina Perrino
Professor/Director of Linguistics Program; Professor and Director of the Linguistics Program; TRIP Courtesy Title
Anthropology; The Linguistics Program; Translation Research and Instruction Program (TRIP)
Background
Perrino is a linguistic anthropologist with a multidisciplinary interest in language and culture. She has conducted fieldwork in Senegal and among Senegalese migrants in Italy. She has examined the modernization of Senegalese ethnomedicine. More recently her research explores the politics of dialect revitalization in northern Italy, showing how language becomes racialized in everyday social life. In particular, she examines the relationship between Italian anxieties about foreign migrants in northern Italy and efforts by conservative political parties to preserve and promote “regional” culture, especially through the promotion of local Italian dialects. Her research interests include tacit racism in everyday conversation; racialized language in joke-telling in northern Italy; new methods for studying oral narratives; language use in ethnomedical encounters and in political speeches; and transnational and globalizing aspects of language use.
Education
- PhD, University of Pennsylvania
Research Interests
- Intimacy in Interaction
- Language use in Ethnomedical Encounters & Political Speeches
- Oral Narratives as Discursive Practices
- Racialized Language in Everyday Conversation
- Spatiotemporal Relations (Chronotope)
- Research Methods in Linguistic Anthropology
- Fitness Culture and Practices
