Kira Hall is Professor of Linguistics and . She also has affiliated faculty positions in The College of Media, Communication, and Information (CMCI) and the Department of Women and Gender Studies (WGST). She received her PhD in Linguistics in 1995 at the University of California, Berkeley, and has since held faculty positions at Rutgers, Yale, Stanford, and the University of Colorado. Spanning linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, her research focuses on language and social identity in India and the United States, particularly with respect to hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic class. Much of this ongoing work addresses the semiotic practices of communities associated with sexual alterity in India during accelerated globalization. Her recent work has turned to diverse topics that include language and sociality in autism, code switching and globalization, embodied sociolinguistics, language and media in an alleged case of female mass hysteria in upstate New York, and the role of gesture in the entertainment appeal of presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Professor Hall's articles appear in diverse linguistic and anthropology journals, among them American Ethnologist, Discourse Studies, Discourse and Society, Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, Journal of Politeness Research, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology,ÌýLanguage in Society, and Multilingua. Book publications include the edited volumes  (Routledge 1995),Ìý (Oxford 1997),ÌýEssays in Indian Folk Traditions (Archana 2007),ÌýStudies in Inequality and Social Justice (Archana 2009), and The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality (Oxford forthcoming).