Events

UPCOMING EVENTS


Call for Papers: Inaugural ELAN Conference

“Linguistic Anthropology in Europe: Past, Present, Futures”

Leiden University, Netherlands, 6-7 November 2025

Keynote speaker: Dr Aurora Donzelli, Associate Professor, University of Bologna

We are delighted to announce the first ELAN conference. The goal of this conference of ELAN, the Linguistic Anthropology Network of EASA, is to bring together a wide range of scholars interested in doing and defining linguistic anthropology in the European context, whether Europe is their fieldsite, institutional base, or European scholars are simply key interlocutors.

How do we define linguistic anthropology, and how do we carry out linguistic anthropology? In the North American context, linguistic anthropology has commonly been associated with a particular history that stretches from Franz Boas’ establishment of the “four fields” of anthropology at the turn of the twentieth century to later efforts to bring insights from American pragmatist semiotics, interactional approaches, Conversation Analysis, and folklore to bear on anthropological research on language-in-use. European linguistic anthropological scholarship, by contrast, emerges from a broader and more varied history of engagement between studies of language, signs, and culture, that has developed across a range of disciplinary contexts and approaches, including but not limited to anthropological linguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, and Continental semiotics.

In this conference, we invite linguistic anthropologists, broadly defined, to come together to explore the range of theoretical and methodological approaches that have composed and now compose linguistic anthropological scholarship in Europe and to imagine future possibilities and directions for carrying out linguistic anthropological research in and on Europe. We welcome papers, panels, and roundtables that showcase scholars’ own linguistic anthropological scholarship, examine intersections and dialogues between different theoretical traditions, and/or reflect on the past, present and future of linguistic anthropology in Europe.

ELAN’s mission is to support research and teaching in linguistic anthropology across European academic institutions and to facilitate community building among linguistic anthropologists and allied scholars who work, study, research, or are otherwise interested in Europe. The network was founded in 2018 by Dr Laura Siragusa and Dr Jenanne K Ferguson.

To propose a paper or pre-formed panel or roundtable, please fill out the google form here.

Deadline: 15 May 2025

We aim to notify all applicants of our decisions by July 1. If you have questions, feel free to contact the organizers of the conference.

This conference will be held in person. If you would like to present your work to the ELAN community online, we have a monthly online workshop that runs throughout the academic year. Sign up for the ELAN listserv to receive information about spring 2025 workshops. For the 2025-2026 academic year, we will circulate a call for papers for the workshop sometime in summer or fall 2025.

We hope to see you in Leiden in November!

Meghanne Barker -
Elina I. Hartikainen -
Chelsie Yount -
Janet Connor -

About Dr. Donzelli:

Aurora Donzelli is Associate Professor of linguistic and social anthropology at the University of Bologna, Italy—a position she took after teaching for over a decade in New York, at Sarah Lawrence College. Her research deals with language and political economy in different contexts. Aside from her long-term fieldwork in Indonesia, she has worked on US political discourse and the postcolonial Lusophonic imagination in Portugal and East Timor. In Methods of Desire (University of Hawaii Press, 2019), she examines how the growing influence of transnational lending agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank is transforming how people desire, voice their entitlements, and imagine the future in upland Indonesia. Her second monograph, One or Two Words (NUS Press, 2020), analyzes the transformations in political talk ensuing from Indonesia’s administrative restructuring and describes the emerging forms of cosmopolitan indigeneity and the novel ways of imagining the nation-state in the Indonesian peripheries. Entitled Back to the Roots, her current book project explores the Italian “neorural revival” as a linguistic and cultural response to the parallel standardization of agricultural labor and human interaction ensuing from the post-WWII rural exodus.

Dr Donzelli received her BA and MA in Philosophy at the University of Pavia and her PhD in anthropology from the University of Milan-Bicocca and held research and teaching appointments in Europe, US, and Southeast Asia, including the University of Milano-Bicocca, the Institute of Social Sciences and Institute of Theoretical and Computational Linguistics, in Lisbon, the Asian Civilizations Museum (ACM) in Singapore. Her research has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology.