UMass Boston

Jennifer Sclafani

Department:
Applied Linguistics
Title:
Assistant Professor
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Areas of Expertise

Intercultural communication, Sociolinguistics, language and identity, gender, language ideologies, narrative analysis, political discourse analysis

Degrees

PhD, Linguistics, Georgetown University
MS, Linguistics, Georgetown University
BA, Italian and French Studies, The University of Virginia

Professional Publications & Contributions

  • 2019. (with M. Marmorstein) The talkback genre: Practice and the cultural construal of online commenting in Israel. Discourse, Context & Media, 31, 100321. 
  • 2019. Can a woman sound presidential? Scientific American, Guest Blog. February 6, 2019. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/can-a-woman-sound-presidential/
  • 2018. (with A. Nikolaou). Representations of Self and Other in narratives of return migration. In C. Ghezzi, P. Molinelli, & K. Beeching (eds.), Positioning Self and Other: Linguistic Traces. John Benjamins.
  • 2017. Talking Donald Trump: A Sociolinguistic Study of Style, Metadiscourse, and Political Identity. London: Routledge. 
  • 2017. Sociolinguistics in and for the media. In B. Childs, C. Mallinson, & G. Van Herk (eds.), Data Collection in Sociolinguistics: Methods and Applications, 2nd edition. Routledge.
  • 2017.  Performing politics: From the town hall to inauguration. In R. Wodak & B. Forchtner (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics. London: Routledge. 398-411.
  • 2016. The idiolect of Donald Trump. Scientific American, Guest Blog. March 25, 2016. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/the-idiolect-of-donald-trump/
  • 2015. Family as a framing resource for political identity construction: Introduction sequences in presidential primary debates. Language in Society 44(3): 369-399.
  • 2012. Parodic performances as indexical negatives of style. In J.M. Hernández-Campoy & J.A. Cutillas-Espinosa (eds.), Style-Shifting in Public: New Perspectives on Stylistic Variation. John Benjamins.
  • 2009. Martha Stewart behaving Badly: Parody and the symbolic meaning of style. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13(5): 613-633.
  • 2008. The intertextual origins of public opinion: Constructing Ebonics in the New York Times. Discourse & Society 19(4): 507-527.  

Additional Information

Research Interests:
Dr. Sclafani's research takes an interactional sociolinguistic approach to examine identity construction and language ideologies. Her current project examines how political candidates construct "presidential selves" in US presidential primary campaign events, with a focus on how women candidates discursively navigate the double bind of gender and leadership through the use of personal narrative. She is also involved in a study of how return migrants to Greece from the diaspora conceptualize their heritage language and culture, and how they use different varieties of Greek to illustrate their affiliations with and attitudes toward their communities. 

Courses Taught:

APLING 605: Theories and Principles of Language Teaching
APLING 614: Bilingual and Multicultural Education
APLING 615: Dual Language Pedagogy
APLING 635: Literacy and Culture
APLING 637: Ethnography