K.D. Thompson

Position title: Professor

Teaching

Religion 201: Religion in/and Everyday Language
African 407: Language, Gender, and Sexuality in African Contexts
African 500: Language in Society in Africa

Advising

Dr. Thompson works with students interested in conducting research in the areas of African languages, critical applied linguistics, language and gender/sexuality, cultural approaches to discourse, discourse-centered approaches to culture, and linguistic ethnography. They have supervised recent dissertations addressing the following topics:

Discourses of discrimination among Iranian migrants in Germany
Narrative and discursive practices in the Rwandan diaspora surrounding the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi
Use of non-Standard Yoruba in Yoruba-language classrooms in Nigeria
Language ideologies and multilingual practices in a Yoruba study abroad program
Codeswitching in Indonesian popular texts

Selected Publications

Thompson, K. Zimbabwe’s Cinematic Arts: Language, Power, Identity. Indiana University Press, 2012.
Thompson, K. Popobawa: Tanzanian Talk, Global Misreadings. Indiana University Press, 2017.