Institute for Research in the Humanities

KD Thompson

Position title: UW–Madison open-topic Resident Fellow (2025–2026)

Address:
Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities, Religious Studies Program, UW–Madison

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Women, Voice, and Muslim Radio in Tanzania

Thompson’s fourth monograph, Women, Voice, and Muslim Radio in Tanzania, explores women’s engagement with a Swahili-language nondenominational Muslim radio station, Radio Nuur in Tanga, Tanzania. This linguistic anthropological study examines mediatized religious discourse and women’s “voice” in radio production and reception. By analyzing ethnographic data, interviews, and broadcasts, Thompson investigates how radio discourse influences women’s social and religious participation and how they, in turn, influence the station. The project seeks to contribute to understanding the interplay between language, gender, religion, and media, highlighting the role of radio in shaping gender dynamics and religious identities in East Africa.

Thompson is a linguistic anthropologist and scholar of religion whose research focuses on language and gender in Muslim communities in both East Africa and North America. They are the author of Muslims on the Margins: Creating Queer Religious Community in North America (NYU Press, 2023), Popobawa: Tanzanian Talk, Global Misreadings (Indiana UP, 2017), and Zimbabwe’s Cinematic Arts: Language, Power, Identity (Indiana UP, 2012), and co-editor of Gendered Lives in the Indian Ocean: Islam, Marriage, and Sexuality on the Swahili Coast (Ohio UP, 2015). Their recent work has also appeared in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology, the Journal of African Cinemas, the African Studies Review, American Anthropologist, and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.