Michele Koven is Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with courtesy appointments in the Departments of Anthropology. French, Global Studies, and the Center for Writing Studies.
Using ethnographic and discourse analytic approaches, her research interests include how people enact, infer, and evaluate images of social types in interaction. She is particularly interested in people’s interpretations and experiences of their own and others’ « identities » in multilingual contexts She has most extensively addressed these issues through the prism of oral storytelling among young people of Portuguese origin, raised in France. More recently, she has begun exploring these issues in social media.
Publications
Marques, I. S., & Koven, M. E. J. (2017). “We are going to our Portuguese homeland!”: French Luso-descendants’ diasporic Facebook conarrations of vacation return trips to Portugal. Narrative Inquiry, 27(2), 286-310.
Koven, M. E. J. (2016). Essentialization strategies in the storytellings of young Luso-descendant women in France: Narrative calibration, voicing, and scale. Language and Communication, 46, 19-29.
Jaffe, A., Koven, M. E. J., Perrino, S., & Vigouroux, C. (2015). Heteroglossia, performance, power, and participation. Language in Society, 44(2) , 135-139.
Koven, M. E. J., & Simões Marques, I. (2015). Performing and evaluating (non)modernities of Portuguese migrant figures on YouTube: The case of Antonio de Carglouch. Language in Society 44(2), 213-242.
Koven, M. E. J. (2014). Interviewing: Practice, ideology, genre, and intertextuality. Annual Review of Anthropology, 43, 499-520.
Koven, M. (2013). Antiracist, modern selves and racist, unmodern others: Chronotopes of modernity in Luso-descendants’ race talk. Language and Communication. 33(4), 544-558.
Koven, M. (2013). Speaking French in Portugal: An analysis of contested models of emigrant personhood in narratives about return migration and language use. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 17(3), 324-354.
Koven, M. (2007). Selves in two languages: Bilingual verbal enactments of identity in French and Portuguese. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Koven, M. (2004). Transnational perspectives on sociolinguistic capital among Luso-descendants in France and Portugal. American Ethnologist, 31(2), 270-290.
Work for CID:
Michele Koven wrote KC72: Intertextuality and translated it into French; she has also served as a reviewer of French translations.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 