Camille DeJarnett

Camille DeJarnett's research broadly concerns the formation of political community in emerging and socially divided democracies. Her current work focuses on language's political significance in multilingual developing states, on citizen expectations of the state in young democracies, and on the long-run history of institutional language management.

Her dissertation book project combines experimental methods, qualitative interviews, and comparative political theory to identify the potential for lingua francas to support the emergence of civic community in new democracies. Motivated by scholarly interest in sub-Saharan Africa's high levels of ethnolinguistic diversity, the dissertation highlights the presence and vitality of lingua francas in the region, as contrasted with the limited state support these languages generally receive. Centrally, the project captures the practical and ethical challenges associated with state-maintained diglossia, together with the degree to which lingua francas might serve as a solution.

Camille has received recognition as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Her work has additionally been supported by grants from the King Center on Global Development, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, SurveyCTO, the Freeman Spogli Institute, the McCoy Family Center for Ethics, the Stanford Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society, and the Stanford Center for African Studies. She holds a PhD and an MA in Political Science from Stanford University and a BS in Linguistics from MIT.