Elise Berman is associate professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is a linguistic, cultural, and psychological anthropologist broadly interested in the sociolinguistic construction of difference. With a specialty in language socialization, she has analyzed the sociolinguistic construction of age in Oceania, the racialization of Marshallese in schools in the U.S., and the stigmatization of Jews in the American academy. Her publications include Talking Like Children: Language and the Production of Age in the Marshall Islands, the Oxford Handbook of Language Socialization (co-edited with Benjamin Smith); “Chronology and its Meaning” (Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, with Bill Brandon); and “Different as deficient: Challenging the language of difference in constructions of Marshallese and other minoritized students” (Linguistics & Education). She is currently working on two projects: an analysis of Marshallese experiences in the U.S. education system; and an investigation of linguistic constructions of “Jews” in American academia. Her work has been supported by the National Geographic Foundation, National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Society for Psychological Anthropology, the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, the Academic Engagement Network, the University of Chicago, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
