Kira Hall

Affiliated Faculty Positions
Department of Media Studies
Department of Women & Gender Studies

Directorships
Culture, Language, and Social Practice (CLASP) Program
Autistic Life and Language (ALL) Project

Kira Hall is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Anthropology. Her work is situated at the intersection of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, two closely related fields focused on the relationship between language and society. Her interdisciplinary commitment to both of these fields is reflected in the academic positions she has held since earning her PhD in 1995 at the University of California Berkeley, which include an Assistant Professor position in the Department of Anthropology at Yale and a Visiting Assistant Professor position in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford. Between 2019 and 2021, she served as President of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, the flagship organization within the American Anthropological Association for the study of language and social life. 

Dr. Hall’s research examines issues of language and social identity in India and United States, particularly as they materialize within hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic class and shift under processes of globalization. Central to this undertaking is her ethnographic work on the language practices of Hindi-speaking communities identifying with nonnormative systems of gender and sexuality in northern India, among them hijras, kotis, gay men, lesbians, and TGs. Her publications include the pathbreaking volumes Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self (with Mary Bucholtz, Routledge 1995), Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality (with Anna Livia, Oxford 1997), and The Oxford Handbook in Language and Sexuality (Oxford Handbooks Online), along with three volumes published in India recognizing the life and work of Hindi poet, linguist, and folklorist Ved Prakash Vatuk: Essays in Indian Folk Traditions (Archana 2007), Studies in Inequality and Social Justice (Archana 2009), and Lifelong Search for Home: Collected English Poems of Ved Prakash Vatuk (New World 2023). In recent years, her work has turned to allied topics that include embodied sociolinguistics, language and gesture in contemporary US politics, and language and neurodiversity, especially autism.

Dr. Hall's research has received support from a variety of external funding agencies, including the American Institute of Indian Studies, Fulbright-Hays, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, Phi Beta Kappa, Rotary Foundation, US Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies, US Department of Education Jacob J. Javitz, and Wenner-Gren Foundation. At CU Boulder, her awards include the title of Distinguished Professor in 2022 (the highest honor the university system awards to its its faculty), Collaborative Access & Innovation Award in 2026, Best Should Teach Gold Award in 2021, the College Scholar Award in 2014, ASSETT Outstanding Teacher with Technology Award in 2013, Provost Faculty Achievement Award in 2010, Boulder Faculty Assembly Teaching Excellence Award in 2009, and Outstanding Faculty Advisor Award in 2004. In 2026, Dr. Hall received the Arnold Zwicky Award from the Linguistic Society of America in recognition of her career contributions to the study of language and sexuality.