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Kira Hall is Distinguished Professor and Chair of Linguistics and Director of the Culture, Language, and Social Practice (CLASP) Program. She holds a courtesy appointment in Anthropology and affiliated positions in Media Studies and Women & Gender Studies. She also serves as Director of the recently established Autistic Life and Language (ALL) Project.

Dr. Hall earned her PhD in Linguistics in 1995 at the University of California, Berkeley, holding faculty positions at Rutgers-Camden (English), Yale (Anthropology), and Stanford (Linguistics) before joining the Â鶹ӰԺ in 2001. Her research, situated across the fields of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, explores how language shapes social identity, particularly with respect to gender and sexuality. Much of her work addresses the language practices of gender-variant communities in India during accelerated globalization, focusing on the ways Hindi, ÌýEnglish, and Hinglish offer class-based resources for gender and sexual expression. More recently, her research has turned to diverse topics that include language and embodiment, the role of gesture in Trump's entertainment appeal, media discourses in an alleged case of mass hysteria, the semiotics of anti-trans rhetoric, the social life of autistic accents, and language and neurodiversity from a sociocultural linguistic perspective. Between 2019 and 2021, she served as the President of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, one of the largest organizations in North America dedicated to the study of language and society. In 2026, she received the Linguistic Society of America's Arnold Zwicky Award for career contributions to the study of language and sexuality.

Professor Hall's articles have appeared in a variety of social science journals, among themÌýAmerican Ethnologist, Annual Review of Anthropology, Discourse Studies, Discourse and Society, Gender and Language, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, Journal of Politeness Research, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology,ÌýLanguage in Society,ÌýMultilingua, and The Journal of Sex Research.Ìý Her book publications include the early volumes Gender Articulated (with Mary Bucholtz, Routledge 1995) and Queerly Phrased (with Anna Livia, Oxford 1997), as well as three volumes published in India on the lifework of Hindi linguist, poet, and folklorist Ved Prakash Vatuk, Essays in Indian Folk TraditionsÌý(Archana 2007),ÌýStudies in Inequality and Social JusticeÌý(Archana 2009), and Lifelong Search for Home (New World 2023). With Rusty Barrett, she is coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality, now published at Oxford Handbooks Online.