Jonathan Rosa

Bio

Jonathan Rosa is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and, by courtesy, Departments of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Dr. Rosa is also Director of Stanford’s Program in Chicanx-Latinx Studies and Co-Director of the Center for Global Ethnography. His research examines the co-naturalization of language and race as a key feature of modern governance. Specifically, he tracks colonially structured interrelations among racial marginalization, linguistic stigmatization, and institutional inequity. Dr. Rosa collaborates with local communities to investigate these phenomena and develop tools for understanding and challenging the forms of disparity to which they correspond. This community-based approach to research, teaching, and service reflects a vision of scholarship as a platform for imagining and enacting more just societies. Dr. Rosa is author of the award-winning book Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (2019, Oxford University Press) and co-editor of the volume Language and Social Justice in Practice (2019, Routledge). His work has appeared in scholarly journals such as the Harvard Educational Review, American Ethnologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Language in Society, as well as media outlets such as The New York Times, The Nation, NPR, and Univision. Dr. Rosa obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, and his B.A. in Linguistics and Educational Studies from Swarthmore College.

Academic Appointments

• Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education
• Associate Professor (By courtesy), Linguistics
• Associate Professor (By courtesy), Anthropology
• Associate Professor (By courtesy), Comparative Literature

Honors & Awards

• First Book Award (Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race), American Association for Applied Linguistics (2021)
• Prose Award for Excellence in Language & Linguistics (Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race), Association of American Publishers (2020)
• Charles A. Ferguson Award for Outstanding Scholarship, Center for Applied Linguistics (2018)

Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations

• Assistant Professor, Education (also, Anthropology, Linguistics, Comparative Race & Ethnic Studies), Stanford University (2015 - 2020)
• Postdoctoral Fellow, Latina/o Studies Program, Northwestern University (2015 - 2016)
• Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts Amherst (2011 - 2015)
• Faculty Fellow, Latina/o Studies Program, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University (2010 - 2011)

Program Affiliations

• Center for Latin American Studies

Professional Education

• Ph.D., University of Chicago, Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology (2010)
• M.A., University of Chicago, Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology (2006)
• B.A., Swarthmore College, Linguistics and Educational Studies (2003)

Research Interests

• Diversity and Identity
• Immigrants and Immigration
• Literacy and Language
• Poverty and Inequality
• Race and Ethnicity
• Sociology
• Teachers and Teaching

Current Research and Scholarly Interests

Dr. Rosa’s book, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolingusitic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (2019, Oxford University Press), presents an ethnographic analysis of how administrators in a Chicago public high school whose student body is more than 90% Mexican and Puerto Rican seek to transform “at risk” Latinx youth into “young Latino professionals.” This intersectional mobility project paradoxically positions Latinx identity as the cause of and solution to educational underachievement. As a result, students must learn to be – and sound – “Latino” in highly studied ways. Students respond to anxieties surrounding their ascribed identities by symbolically remapping borders between nations, languages, ethnoracial categories, and institutional contexts. This reimagining of political, linguistic, cultural, and educational borders reflects the complex interplay between racialization and socialization for Latinx youth. The manuscript argues that this local scene is a key site in which to track broader structures of educational inequity by denaturalizing categories, differences, and modes of recognition through which raciolinguistic exclusion is systematically reproduced across contexts.