My current book project is entitled Language, Diaspora and Home: Mother Tongues, and is under contract with Routledge Press. This volume explores the linguistic lives of second-, third- and fourth- generation immigrants as they navigate migration, family and diaspora. Using an approach that straddles literary analysis and linguistic anthropology, Language, Diaspora and Home investigates language maintenance and development within transnational, mobile families, using poetry and ethnography to explore the work that individuals and families do to maintain or reclaim family languages. At the core of the project is the observation that women often function as the gatekeepers and custodians of family language: they are the ones who do the work to ensure that families maintain heritage language, OR they are the ones who make the decisions to let languages go, or to limit their use in their families, as they navigate the social and educational pressures felt by their own generation and those that follow in migrant families. Mother Tongues shows how the competing pressures of language maintenance and language assimilation play out within families and communities, and offers a wide-ranging discussion of women’s strategies for maintaining and reclaiming family languages. Through interviews with multiple generations of immigrant- and globally-mobile families, Mother Tongues shows how a family’s relationship with family languages can change as members of the family move around the world, or stay put and become enmeshed in “mainstream” linguistic cultures; through the reading of poetry, the book explores how authors, either the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves, navigate the linguistic landscapes of home and community. Mother Tongues offers a view of language acquisition and maintenance that centers women’s experience, and domestic spaces, in ways that few previous studies have.

Melissa Dinsman and I also have a book chapter which has been accepted to a volume currently under review at Bloomsbury Press. It is:

Dinsman, Melissa and Heather Robinson. Dispatches from the Home Front: Violet Hunt as War Writer and Reluctant Modernist. To appear in Petar Penda and Andrew Frayn (eds). Non-Canonical British Literature 1890-1945. 20 pp.

If you’d like to know more about any of this project, or anything else that you see on these pages, you can contact me at hrobinson@york.cuny.edu