Jillian R. Cavanaugh

Jillian R. Cavanaugh is a linguistic and cultural anthropologist who received her PhD from New York University. She is professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at Brooklyn College CUNY, and on the faculty of the Anthropology Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her first research project on language ideologies culminated in the book, Living Memory: The Social Aesthetics of Language in a Northern Italian Town (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Her current research is with food producers in northern Italy. Her work has analyzed language and social transformation, materiality, gender, the value of heritage food, and labor in late capitalism. She has written about dialect poetry in Italy and the work of Elena Ferrante. Her most recent book, coedited with Shalini Shankar, is Language and Materiality: Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Cavanaugh is a 1999 IDRF fellow.