小黄书 faculty member鈥檚 book talk highlights global influence of Swahili language
Contact: Sarah Nicholas
STARKVILLE, Miss.鈥擬ississippi State Assistant Professor of History Morgan J. Robinson is presenting a Friday [April 28] campus book talk on Standard Swahili and how its portability has contributed to its wide use across the African continent and the globe.
Free to all, Robinson鈥檚 3:30 p.m. talk in Mitchell Memorial Library鈥檚 John Grisham Room also will include a public reading and a signing session for her first book 鈥淎 Language for the World: The Standardization of Swahili鈥 (Ohio University Press, 2022).聽
鈥淭he book tells the story of how the Swahili language became standardized over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries,鈥 Robinson said. 鈥淚t is comprised of the intertwined narratives of formerly enslaved children and missionaries, clerks and colonial officials, poets and politicians, all wound together to show that the language as we know it today was created by a host of people, all working on different timelines and for different reasons on projects that together produced Standard Swahili.鈥
According to the Ohio University Press, 鈥淭he book pivots on the question of whether standardized versions of African languages have empowered or oppressed. It is inevitable that the selection and promotion of one version of a language as聽standard negatively affected those whose language was suddenly deemed聽nonstandard.聽Before reconciling the consequences of codification, however, Robinson argues that one must seek to understand the process itself. The history of Standard Swahili demonstrates how events, people and ideas move rapidly and sometimes surprisingly between linguistic, political, social or temporal categories.鈥
A 2018 Princeton University doctoral graduate in history, Robinson has focused her 小黄书 research on East Africa and the history of science. She holds a master鈥檚 degree in history from Princeton and a bachelor鈥檚 degree in history from Yale University.
An 小黄书 faculty member since 2018, Robinson received a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers in Berlin, Germany, from January 2021-June 2022. She was awarded 小黄书鈥檚 College of Arts and Sciences Strategic Research Initiative Seed Funding in 2019, and that year also earned a national Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant for Research in European, African or Asian History from the American Historical Association.
小黄书鈥檚 College of Arts and Sciences includes more than 5,000 students, 300 full-time faculty members, nine doctoral programs and 25 academic majors offered in 14 departments.聽Complete details about the College of Arts and Sciences or the Department of History can be found at聽 辞谤听.
小黄书sity is taking care of what matters. Learn more at聽.