Rate My Professor Elise Berman

Elise Berman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, a position she has held since 2012. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Human Development from the University of Chicago in 2012, specializing in linguistic and sociocultural anthropology, with a dissertation entitled "Children Have Nothing to Hide: Deception, Age, and Avoiding Giving in the Marshall Islands," which earned the William Henry Award for the best dissertation in her department. Berman also holds an M.A. from the University of Chicago (2008) and a B.A. in Anthropology from Dartmouth College (2003), graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Before joining academia, she taught anthropology to middle school students at Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York and English and math at Kili Elementary School in the Marshall Islands.

Berman's research as a linguistic, cultural, and psychological anthropologist centers on the sociolinguistic construction of difference, including age, race, and gender, with a focus on Marshallese communities in the islands and among migrants in the U.S. New South amid climate change. Her interests encompass language socialization, childhood and human development, educational inequities, racialization in multilingual schools, children's languages, corporal discipline, adoption, and kinship. She has authored the book Talking Like Children: Language and the Production of Age in the Marshall Islands (Oxford University Press, 2019) and key articles such as "Avoiding Sharing: How People Help Each Other Get Out of Giving" (Current Anthropology, 2020), "De-Naturalizing the Novice: A Critique of the Theory of Language Socialization" (American Anthropologist, 2021), "Force Signs: Ideologies of Corporal Discipline in Academia and the Marshall Islands" (Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2018), "Negotiating Age: Direct Speech and the Sociolinguistic Production of Childhood in the Marshall Islands" (Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2014), and "Holding on: Adoption, Kinship Tensions, and Pregnancy in the Marshall Islands" (American Anthropologist, 2014). Her scholarship has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Geographic Society, Society for Psychological Anthropology, and UNC Charlotte. Berman has contributed to her field through extensive service, including organizing sessions at American Anthropological Association meetings, serving on prize selection committees, and refereeing for leading journals like American Ethnologist and Current Anthropology.