Contact: Sarah Nicholas

STARKVILLE, Miss.—Mississippi State Assistant Professor of History Morgan J. Robinson is presenting a Friday [April 28] campus book talk on Standard Swahili and how its portability has contributed to its wide use across the African continent and the globe.

Free to all, Robinson’s 3:30 p.m. talk in Mitchell Memorial Library’s John Grisham Room also will include a public reading and a signing session for her first book “A Language for the World: The Standardization of Swahili” (Ohio University Press, 2022). 

“The book tells the story of how the Swahili language became standardized over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries,” Robinson said. “It is comprised of the intertwined narratives of formerly enslaved children and missionaries, clerks and colonial officials, poets and politicians, all wound together to show that the language as we know it today was created by a host of people, all working on different timelines and for different reasons on projects that together produced Standard Swahili.”

According to the Ohio University Press, “The book pivots on the question of whether standardized versions of African languages have empowered or oppressed. It is inevitable that the selection and promotion of one version of a language as standard negatively affected those whose language was suddenly deemed nonstandard. Before reconciling the consequences of codification, however, Robinson argues that one must seek to understand the process itself. The history of Standard Swahili demonstrates how events, people and ideas move rapidly and sometimes surprisingly between linguistic, political, social or temporal categories.”

A 2018 Princeton University doctoral graduate in history, Robinson has focused her MSU research on East Africa and the history of science. She holds a master’s degree in history from Princeton and a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University.

An MSU faculty member since 2018, Robinson received a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers in Berlin, Germany, from January 2021-June 2022. She was awarded MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences Strategic Research Initiative Seed Funding in 2019, and that year also earned a national Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant for Research in European, African or Asian History from the American Historical Association.

MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences includes more than 5,000 students, 300 full-time faculty members, nine doctoral programs and 25 academic majors offered in 14 departments. Complete details about the College of Arts and Sciences or the Department of History can be found at www.cas.msstate.edu or www.history.msstate.edu.

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