Robin Ann Shoaps

(PhD, UC Santa Barbara, 2004) Assistant Professor of Anthropology and of the Social Sciences in the College, has been engaged in research sites in Guatemala and North America, broadly interrogating the linguistic and cultural construction of moral discourses and personhood. She has worked extensively with North American Pentecostalism and Sakapultek Maya folk-Catholic ritual and is currently working on a project comparing language use and associated constructions of subjectivity among Sakapultek and North American Pentecostals. In addition, her most recent fieldwork concerns the contemporary prophetic movement among North American evangelicals, with a particular emphasis on mass-mediated training materials and the virtual publics they entail.

E-mail: shoaps@uchicago.edu
Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
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Publications:

n.d. Wedding Morality and Everyday Talk in a Maya Community. (Book manuscript in preparation, with target completion summer 2010).

2009  Ritual and (Im)moral Voices: Locating the Testament of Judas in Sakapultek Communicative Ecology. American Ethnologist. 36(3): 459-477 (in press).

2009  Moral Irony and Moral Personhood in Sakapultek Discourse and Culture. In A. Jaffee, ed., The Sociolinguistics of Stance. Oxford University Press, 155-201.

2007 Moral Irony: Modal Particles, Moral Persons and Indirect Stance-Taking in Sakapultek Discourse. Pragmatics 17(2): 297-335.

2004 Morality in Grammar and Discourse: Stance-Taking and the Negotiation of Moral Personhood in Sakapultek (Mayan) Wedding Counsels. PhD Dissertation. University of California, Santa Barbara (Linguistics).

2002 "Pray Earnestly": The Textual Construction of Personal Involvement in Pentecostal Prayer and Song. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 12(1):34-71.

1999 The Many Voices of Rush Limbaugh: The Use of Transposition in Constructing a Rhetoric of Common Sense. Text 19(3):399-437.

n.d. Sakapultek Directives: Resources for Indexing Loci of Moral Authority (in preparation).

n.d. Translation and the Technology of Proselytization: Evangelical Radio and Its Challenge to Sakapultek Moral Discourse Genres (in preparation).

n.d. Becoming His Voice: Prophetic Chronotopes, Divine Intention, Human Agency and Technologies of Self-Making in the Pentecostal Prophetic Movement (in preparation).

n.d.  Religious Conversion and the Rhetorical Contestation of Moral Authority in Sacapulas, Guatemala (in preparation).