Tamara Valentine, Ph.D.

Professor, Emerita
Tamara Valentine

Summary

Tamara Valentine, a native Chicagoan of Lithuanian descent, earned her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Valentine works in the area of sociolinguistics and has published articles and presented papers on topics related to English as an international language, South Asian languages and linguistics, discourse analysis, language and gender, and cross-cultural communication. She specializes in the contextualization of world Englishes within a sociolinguistic framework, particularly taking an integrative sociocultural approach to the study of Indian English and the construction of gender. She has been awarded a number of grants to conduct fieldwork in India, has held a series of lectureships in Lithuania, India and Costa Rica, and has traveled extensively throughout South Asia, Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. In 2017, the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program awarded Valentine the bi-national U.S.-France International Education Administrators Award to engage with French international education professionals and promote globalization initiatives. She has participated on national screening committees for the Fulbright Student Award, Critical Language Scholarship, Gilman Scholarship, Boren award, Phi Kappa Phi and the USIEF in Delhi, India. Valentine has taught linguistics and English as a second language at the University of Illinois, Michigan State University and the University of South Carolina, Upstate.

Research interests

  • World Englishes
  • South Asian languages
  • linguistics and literature
  • discourse analysis
  • language and gender

Recent publications

  • Creative Acts of Gender in World Englishes.  Handbook of World Englishes, 2nd ed. Edited by Braj B. Kachru and Cecil Nelson. Blackwell. 2019.
  • Access to a Quality Education: First Generation Students Reach for College Honors Education. Access and Opportunity: Experiences from Nevada. University of Nevada, Reno. 2019.
  • A Socially Realistic View of World Englishes: Reflections on Gendered Discourse. World Englishes 2015: 149-163.
  • Language and Prejudice. A Longman Topics Reader. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004.

Education

  • Ph.D., Linguistics, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  • M.A., Linguistics, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign