Katherine E. Hoffman

Associate Professor (PhD Columbia 2000)
1810 Hinman Avenue, Room 206
(847) 491-4565
khoffman@northwestern.edu
http://www.amargntamazirt.com

Curriculum Vita

RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS

Language / Expressive Culture, Ethnicity / Indigenism, Language Ideologies, Language Shift and Endangerment, Gender, Migration, Rural-Urban Relations, French Colonialism, Imazighen (Berbers), Morocco / North Africa, France

Katherine E. Hoffman is a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist who specializes in the relationship between expressive culture, ethnicity, and political economy. Her research explores this nexus in North Africa, and particularly Morocco, from the late 19th c. to the present, particularly as it has been shaped by the processes of French colonialism, anti-imperialism, nationalism, and postnationalism. Her book We Share Walls: Language, Land and Gender in Berber Morocco book (2008, Wiley-Blackwell) is an ethnographic account of the ways in which political economy and migration have shaped rural ethnolinguistic repertoires in both talk and song, and in Arabic and Tashelhit Berber languages, among the Ishelhin Berbers of southwestern Morocco.

A second book currently being drafted, Mirror of the Soul: Language, Islam, and Law in French Native Policy of Morocco (1912-1956), considers the language ideologies underpinning French colonial administration of rural Morocco. It argues that notions about the inherent interrelationship between language, law, religion and morality had consequences for the development of French Native Policy (politique indigène), Moroccan nationalism, and more recently, contemporary struggles around Amazigh (Berber) linguistic and cultural rights. Of particular interest in this project are the Berber customary courts (tribunaux coutumiers) that not only elicited nationalist polemic but also generated massive amounts of labor from Protectorate officials and their North African employees.

With historian Susan Gilson Miller of Harvard University, Hoffman is co-editor of the interdisciplinary volume Berbers and Others: Beyond Tribe and Nation in the Maghrib (Indiana University Press, 2010).

Hoffman has been awarded the American Council of Learned Societies’ Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship, and has received fellowships from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, two divisions of the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright-IIE, and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies. In Spring 2007, Hoffman was a resident fellow at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. She is Associate Editor of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and a previous editorial board member of American Anthropologist. Hoffman conducts field research in Tashelhit Berber, Moroccan Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, and French.

In addition to her scholarly work, since the early 1990s, Hoffman has worked extensively on visual and print media projects, and responsible tourism, to increase understanding of Muslim populations. She has consulted for National Geographic Magazine and served as the expert on National Geographic Expedition's Moroccan Odyssey. She has also researched for numerous documentary film projects in Morocco and in Washington, DC. She authored the Introduction and several chapters of the Fodor’s Morocco first travel guide edition (New York: Random House, 2000). Applying her ethnographic concerns with gender and minority language to governmental policy, Hoffman consulted on a project to raise rural Moroccan girls’ completion of primary school, an initiative co-funded by AMIDEAST and the Moroccan Ministry of Education, in which she advocated for greater attention to native language in the classroom as well as basic sanitary facilities, both crucial to parental choices to remove girls from primary school. Whether in policy evaluation, popular media, or scholarly work, Hoffman is committed to demonstrating the continued relevance—even centrality—of rural life to local, national, and global shifts.