Tommaso M. Milani

Head, Department of Applied Linguistics

Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Applied Linguistics, Jewish Studies, African Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

tommaso.milani@psu.edu

Professional Bio

Tommaso M. Milani is George C. and Jane G. Greer Professor of Applied Linguistics, Jewish Studies, African Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Before joining The Pennsylvania State University, he held positions at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa and the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He identifies as critical discourse analyst who is interested in understanding how power (in)balances are reproduced and contested through meaning-making resources (language, visuality, the body etc.). A considerable amount of his research has focused on gender and male same-sex desire in the context of South Africa. Theoretically, he is influenced by intersectionality, queer theory and southern/decolonial epistemologies. He has published extensively in leading international journals such as Agenda, Discourse, Context & Media, Discourse & Communication, Discourse & Society, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies; he has also edited two books, Language and Masculinities: Performances, Intersections and Dislocations (Routledge 2015) and Queering Language, Gender and Sexuality (Equinox 2017), as well as many special issues of journals. From 2014 until 2017 he was co-editor of the journal African Studies.