Kendall Medford

Kendall Medford is a postdoctoral scholar at the Africana Research Center. She earned her Ph.D. in linguistics from Tulane University where she specialized in Creole language studies. Her scholarly expertise lies with the Haitian diaspora and the Haitian Creole (Kreyòl) language. As large-scale emigrations from Haiti accelerate, this research is broadly concerned with uncovering how the tensions of migration and anti-Blackness affect the variation and use of Kreyòl in diasporic communities.

She has conducted extensive fieldwork with Kreyòl speakers in both the Dominican Republic and Cuba, and her writings have been published in the Journal of Language Contact, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, NACLA, and in several edited volumes. She is currently editing a volume, Ports of Entry: Language in Caribbean Migrations (University Press of Mississippi), which foregrounds the role of language and multilingualism in the exceptionally active mobility corridors of the circum-Caribbean.

At the Africana Research Center, she will primarily work to develop her monograph, Outsourcing Creole: Haitian Labor and Language in the Spanish Caribbean. Based on sociolinguistic and ethnographic fieldwork in the Dominican Republic and Cuba, the book will offer the first comparative study of Kreyòl in Haiti’s two neighboring nations. Using a raciolinguistic framework, this project seeks to uncover how racial and political trajectories are embedded in processes of heritage language change over generations.