David Divita

Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literature

david.divita@pomona.edu

Office:

Mason Hall

233

(909) 607-0866

With Pomona since:

2010

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Expertise

David Divita is a sociocultural linguist who specializes in Spanish- and French-speaking people and places. His interests include the linguistic and semiotic dimensions of age and aging; the experience of belonging, displacement and long-term multilingualism; and the politics of memory—in particular as these phenomena operate among populations with national and affective attachments to contemporary Spain and France. He has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork among Spanish immigrants in France who arrived in the 1960s and are now in later life. He is also currently investigating the relationships among queer subjectivity, patterns of consumption, and the use of English in French gay-lifestyle media; language ideologies and discursive practices that concern domestic service in the U.S.; and the role of desire in language learning. He has published articles in the Journal of Sociolinguistics, the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, the International Journal of Multilingualism and Critical Discourse Studies.

Areas of Expertise

LINGUISTICS

Spanish and French Linguistics
Sociolinguistics
Linguistic Anthropology
Applied Linguistics

Work

"From Paris to Pueblo and Back: (Re-)Emigration and the Modernist Chronotope in Cultural Performance." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 24.1 (2014): 1-18.

"Multilingualism and Later Life: A Sociolinguistic Perspective on Age and Aging." Journal of Aging Studies 30 (2014): 94-103.

"Language Ideologies across Time: Household Spanish Handbooks from 1959 to 2012." Critical Discourse Studies 11.2 (2014): 194-210.

"Multilingualism and the Lifespan: Case Studies from a Language Course for Spanish Seniors in Saint-Denis, France." International Journal of Multilingualism 11.1 (2014): 1-22.

"Online in Later Life: Age as a Chronological Fact and a Dynamic Social Category in an Internet Class for Retirees." Journal of Sociolinguistics 16.5 (2012): 585-612.

"Objects as Artifacts: Synchronic Convergence in Multilingual Contexts." Apples: Journal of Applied Language Studies 5 (2011): http://apples.jyu.fi/index.php?volume=5&issue=1

"Becoming Multilingual: An Ethnographic Approach to SLA Beyond the Classroom." In Phil Benson and Hayo Reinders (Eds.), Beyond the Language Classroom: Theory and Practice of Learning and Teaching. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Education

Ph.D., Romance Languages (2010)
University of California, Berkeley

B.A., French (1995)
Columbia University

Fluent Languages:

French
Spanish
English

Recent Courses Taught

Introduction to Hispanic Linguistics
Spanglish in Context: Bilingualism in the U.S.
Spanish Phonetics and Phonology
Telling Stories: Form and Function of Narrative in Everyday Life
Language and Power in the Francophone World