READING DEPARTMENT

JAMES COLLINS Professor Chair, Dept of Anthropology University at Albany State University of New York School of Education-350 Albany, NY 12222 518-442-5036 collins@albany.edu

Research Interests

Dr. Collins is an anthropologist and linguist whose primary research efforts have been in studies of language and education, especially literacy, and of American Indian languages and cultures, especially Pacific Northwest Athabaskans. Many of his publications have addressed ways of using discourse analysis to understand the dynamics of teaching and learning in socially and culturally diverse urban classrooms and schools. This research has appeared in journals such as the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Linguistics and Education, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Journal of Education, and the Journal of Pragmatics, as well as numerous edited collections. In 1989 he received a National Education Academy Spencer Fellowship to study the politics of literacy at the urban university. In 1993-94 he was recipient of an External Fellowship at the Center for Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture (Rutgers University). He was an investigator in the "Partners in Literacy" phase of the National Research Center for English Learning and Achievement. He holds joint appointments in the Departments of Reading and Anthropology, and has just assumed the Chair of Anthroplogy. He published the book Understanding Tolowa Histories (Routledge) in 1998; his latest book is Literacies and Literacies: Text, Power, and Identity, a book on the anthropology of literacy (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Dr. Collins is currently conducting a Spencer Foundation funded project "Encountering English, Language Learning, Social Class, and Contemporary Immigration in the United States.

James Collins teaches the following courses:

ERDG 610 Literacy and Society
ERDG 715 Analysis of Written Discourse

Recent Publications:

	Collins, J. Literacies and Literacies: Text, Power, and Identity. (2003). Cambridge University Press.
	Collins, J. (1998). Understanding Tolowa Histories: Western Hegemonies and Native American Responses. Routledge.

“Introduction,” In J. Collins & S. Slembrouck (eds.) Multilingualism and Diasporic Populations: Special issue of Language and Communication. 25.3 (July, 2005): 189-195.

“Spaces of multilingualism,” (Jan Blommaert, James Collins & Stef Slembrouck). In J. Collins & S. Slembrouck (eds.) Multilingualism and Diasporic Populations: Special issue of Language and Communication. 25.2 (July, 2005): 197-215.

“Literacy practices in sociocultural perspective,” Entry for the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd Ed. Summer, 2005.

Review of N. Hornberger (ed.) The Continua of Biliteracy for Applied Linguistics, 26.2 (June2005) 284-287.

“Afterword” to M. Baynham & A. De Fina (eds.) Dislocations/Relocations: Narratives of Displacement. St Jerome Publishers, Encounters Series. In press.

The Ebonics Controversy in Context, in Language-Ideological Debates, Jan Blommaert, ed. Mouton de Gruyter. (1999)

Bernstein, Bourdieu and the New Literacy Studies. Linguistics and Education 11.1 (1999).

Understanding Tolowa Histories: Western Hegemonies and Native American Responses.Rutledge. (1998)

Literacy and Literacies. Annual Review of Anthropology 24:75-93 (1995).