Thea Strand
Visiting Assistant Professor
Linguistic and Cultural Anthropology
Thea Strand received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Arizona in 2009. Her primary research involves ongoing cultural and linguistic anthropological fieldwork in rural Valdres, Norway, where she studies the relationships between dialect use, language change, mass media, and political economy. Bringing together ethnography and sociolinguistics, her research demonstrates connections between linguistic and political ideologies and the ways in which
Valdres dialect speakers are presently experiencing change in multiple directions: becoming closer to Oslo speech at the level of phonology, while simultaneously maintaining, or even strengthening, many of their most "traditional" morphological and lexical features. In Valdres and elsewhere in Norway today, we can see dialect maintenance and revitalization supported by official pro-variation policies and ideologies at the national level, as well as by the relative economic vitality of rural districts, a situation quite different from many others in Europe and around the world.
In some of Dr. Strand's current publications, she examines twenty-first century trends in representations of dialect, as well as dialect use, in Norwegian mass media, where "non-normative" varieties are frequently heard and generally viewed positively. She is also presently studying the ways in which the Valdres dialect has recently become a valuable commodity in the growing heritage tourism industry, a trend that appears to be partly facilitated by support from the district's political administration and business community.
In addition to her work in Norway, Dr. Strand has also contributed to a growing body of work examining language variation and change within African American English. In this research, she has combined discourse analysis with acoustic phonetic analysis of recorded interviews from rural Southern Louisiana, focusing on the vowel system and /r/ realization without losing sight of the sociohistorical context of racial inequality.
Publications
(Forthcoming) Winning the Dialect Popularity Contest: Mass-Mediated Language Ideologies and Local Responses in Rural Valdres, Norway. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Spring 2012.
(In press) Dialect as Style in Norwegian Mass Media. In Style-Shifting in Public: New Perspectives on Stylistic Variation. Eds. Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy and Juan Antonio Cutillas-Espinosa. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Mapping a Dialect "Mixtury": African American and White Vowel Phonologies in Rural Southern Louisiana. (Co-author with Michael Wroblewski and Sylvie Dubois.) In African American English Speakers and their Participation in Local Sound Changes: A Comparative Study. Eds. Malcah Yaeger-Dror and Erik R. Thomas. Pp. 48-72. Durham: Duke University
Press. 2010.
Words, Woods, Woyds: Variation and Accommodation in Schwar Realization in Southern Louisiana. (Lead author with Michael Wroblewski and Mary K. Good.) Journal of English Linguistics 38(3): 211-229. 2010.
Teaching at Wake Forest
Fall 2011:
ANT 111 B/C: Peoples and Cultures of the World
FYS 100: Language and Identity
Spring 2012:
ANT 111: Peoples and Cultures of the World
ANT 386: (Special Topics) Language, Race, and Inequality
Contact Information
Postal mail:
Thea Strand
P.O. Box 7807
Winston-Salem, NC 27109
Phone: 336.758.4452
Email: strandtr@wfu.edu |