Elizabeth Falconi, Ph.D.

Lecturer of Anthropology
School of Social Sciences College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

678-839-6458
efalconi@westg39ggcKxSFKKYgM1BZclpE79ytjF8QuV4O4Lgkf1bkMi7a.edu

Miller Hall - Room 1213
Office Hours
Tuesdays/Thursdays 9:45 - 10:45 am, in Miller Room #1213, or virtually by appointment.

Elizabeth Falconi, Ph.D.
Biography

Elizabeth Falconi is a linguistic anthropologist who received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2011. Her research focuses on migration across borders that define and divide nations, social groups, communities, speakers and languages. She came to this focus through her own engagements with language and migration moving between the United States and Latin American during her childhood and then again later as an adult. Her current research investigates a Zapotec transborder community formed by migration between San Juan Guelavía, a rural village in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, and Los Angeles, California. She has found that for highly dispersed populations shared forms of narration, discursive patterning, and reflexive forms of talk enable Guelavians in Oaxaca, Los Angeles and elsewhere to constitute a “narrated community” amid the challenges of fragmentation and transformation faced by community members separated by time and space. Like other indigenous populations, Zapotec communities have been historically marginalized in Mexico, and they comprise a minority within a minority in the United States. For example, among Guelavians fears of language-based discrimination are bound up with two simultaneous and mutually reinforcing patterns of language shift away from Zapotec occurring on both sides of the border, towards the use of English and Spanish. In fact, experiences of marginalization and discrimination are so pervasive that they provide for powerful forms of connectivity that bind Guelavians in diaspora to their kin in Oaxaca.

 

When not teaching or researching, Elizabeth enjoys spending time with her two children, husband, and dog, as well as walks in the woods, swimming, yoga, cooking, and reading fiction.

 

Education / Degrees
  • Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2011
Courses Taught
Course Sections and Syllabi

Fall 2025 Sections

Summer 2025 Sections

Spring 2025 Sections

Fall 2024 Sections

Summer 2024 Sections

Spring 2024 Sections

Fall 2023 Sections

Summer 2023 Sections

Spring 2023 Sections

Fall 2022 Sections

Summer 2022 Sections

Spring 2022 Sections

Fall 2021 Sections

Summer 2021 Sections

Spring 2021 Sections

Fall 2020 Sections

Publication List

Falconi, Elizabeth. (2023) "Narrating Transborder Communities." In A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology. Duranti, George, and Riner (eds.). Wiley-Blackwell. [View Publication External Resource]

Book Review, "Passing: Two Publics in a Mexican Border City, by Rihan Yeh" [View Publication External Resource]

Falconi & Graber. (2019) Storytelling as Narrative Practice: Ethnographic Approaches to the Tales We Tell. Brill Press: Boston, MA. [View Publication External Resource]

"Telling Traditions: The Dynamics of Zapotec Storytelling" [View Publication External Resource]

Falconi, Elizabeth. (2018) [View Publication External Resource]

Linguistic Anthropology and Ethnolinguistics [View Publication External Resource]

“Transborder Contact: Shifting Patterns of Linguistic Differentiation in a Zapotec Community” In The International Journal o [View Publication External Resource]

Falconi, Elizabeth. (2013) "Storytelling, Language Shift, and Revitalization in a Transborder Community: 'Tell it in Zapotec.'" In American Anthropologist. [View Publication External Resource]