Aurora Donzelli

I am a linguistic and cultural anthropologist. My work in Southeast Asia (and beyond) focuses on the nexus between language, politics, and morality to explore ethnographically the relation between structural transformations and everyday communicative practices. How do political reforms, religious conversion, and moral changes presuppose, reflect, or collide with entrenched discursive practices informing the production of common sense?

Among my most recent publications: Methods of Desire: Language, Morality, and Affect in Neoliberal Indonesia (UHP 2019); One or Two Words: Language and Politics in the Toraja highlands of Indonesia (NUS Press 2020); “The Act of Reading Aloud” (Discourse and Society 2020); "Subjects to freedom" (Ethos 2023); “The Tiny Hand of Donald Trump” and "On Metapragmatic Gaslighting " (Signs and Society 2019 and 2023),

Prior to joining the Department of History, Cultures, and Civilizations, I held research and teaching appointments in Europe and the US, including Sarah Lawrence, in New York, the University of Milano-Bicocca, the Institute of Social Sciences and Institute of Theoretical and Computational Linguistics, in Lisbon.