Kendra Calhoun

Dr. Kendra Calhoun - is an Assistant Professor of Linguistic Anthropology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has also served as an President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D in Linguistics at UC Santa Barbara and her B.A. in English Language & Literature and Psychology at the University of South Carolina. 

Dr. Calhoun’s research critically analyzes the intersections of language, identity, and power in face-to-face and mediated contexts. She examines race, gender, humor, activism, social media discourse, and institutional discourses in higher education with a focus on the language, culture, and experiences of Black people in the U.S. Her social media research includes studies of Vine, Tumblr, and Twitter, and she is currently studying the online practices of “Black TikTok” as documentation of Black language and culture. In her dissertation, “Competing Discourses of Diversity and Inclusion: Institutional Rhetoric and Graduate Student Narratives at Two Minority Serving Institutions,” she studied diversity discourse and practice at a Historically Black College/University and a Hispanic Serving Institution and their impact on graduate students of color. Dr. Calhoun's published work can be found in Language, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology,  Language@Internet, and the Journal of Sociolinguistics.