K. D. Thompson

Bio

K.D. Thompson is the Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities, Director of the Doctoral Program in Second Language Acquisition, and Professor of Religious Studies with additional affiliations in African Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Gender & Women’s Studies, and Language Sciences. Their research uses critical ethnography and critical discourse analysis to examine African and Muslim discourse, with specific projects in Zimbabwe, Tanzania, North America, and online.

Research

In Thompson’s first monograph, Zimbabwe’s Cinematic Arts: Language, Power, Identity (Indiana University Press, 2012), they used critical discourse analysis to examine how cultural identity is produced, performed, and negotiated in talk and texts about film and television in Zimbabwe. Their next book, Gendered Lives in the Western Indian Ocean: Islam, Marriage, and Sexuality on the Swahili Coast, a co-edited volume with Erin Stiles from Ohio University Press (2015), brought together anthropologists, historians, linguists, and gender studies scholars to examine Islam, sexuality, gender, and marriage on the Swahili coast and elsewhere in the Indian Ocean. Thompson’s second monograph, Popobawa: Tanzanian Talk, Global Misreadings  (Indiana University Press, 2017), concerned the transgression of discursive taboos and cultural boundaries of gender and sexuality in Swahili talk about the supernatural.

Thompson’s third monograph is based on multi-sited ethnographic research with nonconformist Muslim communities of practice in North America and online, contributing to queer anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and Islamic Studies. Their book, Muslims on the Margins: Creating Queer Religious Community in North America, was published by NYU Press in the North American Religions series in April 2023.

Dr. Thompson’s current research is an ethnography of a Muslim radio station in Tanzania.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4526-9869

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