Kevin is a Ph.D. student in the Romance Languages and Literatures program at UC Berkeley. Through his current research, Kevin plans to apply historical sociolinguistic models to a period in Italian history where it’s never before been done–namely, Italy’s colonial period (1885-1941) in East Africa. Using Italian, Ethiopian, and Eritrean materials (such as court transcripts, letters, and materials used to teach the Italian language overseas) that are currently dispersed throughout libraries and archives in Rome, Kevin hopes to elucidate the ways in which language was used to exert power in the Italian colonies. What did locals think of Italian, and do similar ideologies exist today among East African communities in Italy? How are said ideologies reflected through variation in the lexicon, morphology, or syntax of Italophone East African communities? Overall, Kevin aims to make audible the underrepresented voice of the East African colonial subject in Italian language historiography, hoping to interpolate La storia della lingua italiana with overlooked phenomena of central importance, such as the formation of Italian Pidgin languages, or the (forced) bilingualism which spawned from the Italian colonial period.
Bio/CV:
Role:
