Stephanie V. Love

Stephanie V. Love received a Ph.D. in linguistic and cultural anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2022. Before joining Pitt, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, participating in the interdisciplinary seminar “Repairing the Past.” 

In her first book (under review at the University of Chicago Press), Streets of a Million Martyrs: Poetics and Politics in Urban Algeria, she accompanies Algerians as they move through their beloved and deteriorating Oran—Algeria’s second-largest city—navigating the politically charged context of postcolonialism and shouldering burdens that contradict the freedom and futures for which a “million martyrs” fought and died. By paying close attention to people’s everyday language of and about the city, she demonstrates how city dwellers sustain a revolutionary spirit despite grappling with an all-too-recent history of violence, the crumbling infrastructure surrounding them, and ongoing efforts by the state to silence their diverse stories.

In their efforts to preserve their city and secure adequate homes for their families, ordinary Oranis have developed a vernacular, street-based language that highlights the city’s deteriorating fabric to challenge the postcolonial state, despite oppressive censorship that restricts what can be said in public. This grassroots language has constituted a creative insurgency with significant political potential. In fact, during her fieldwork from 2018 to 2020, a revolutionary movement (the Hirak) erupted seemingly out of nowhere. In Streets of a Million Martyrs, she demonstrates how the Hirak was made possible by this vernacular language, which articulated people’s deep desires for a different future while reckoning with complex and painful histories. In an ethnographic account that situates and historicizes revolution, she poses the following questions: What makes collective political action possible for a people weighed down by decades of despair and disillusionment? How do people create and express new political, social, and historical imaginations that escape both dominant state narratives and pervasive fear stemming from the 1990s civil war that killed between 150,000 and 200,000 people?  

In this book, Dr. Love advances studies on language materiality, colonial/postcolonial language politics, and urban anthropology to demonstrate that the city is not merely the stage for social action but the very form from which social action is made possible. Ordinary city dwellers she encountered during sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Oran revealed the world-making potential of what she calls everyday urban poetics. Broadly speaking, everyday urban poetics refers to the practices through which city dwellers draw collective attention to linguistic forms (placenames, jokes, metaphors, rhymes, moral anecdotes, and strategic code-switches) and urban forms (public spaces, monuments, buildings, cemeteries, the layout of streets, and types of city dwellers) for specific social-political purposes. These everyday linguistic practices can foster collective sentiments, images, and tropes carrying revolutionary political potential. Streets of a Million Martyrs explores where these everyday urban poetics come from and how remarkable yet ordinary people are compelled to redefine the realm of the possible through their everyday practices of dwelling in, speaking about, and navigating the city as forms of social and political action. 

Dr. Love is also dedicated to rethinking higher education in the post-pandemic world and has coordinated several pedagogical initiatives at CUNY, including the STEM Pedagogy Institute, Carnegie Educational Technology Fellowship, and the Heritage Arabic eBook project at the Center for Integrated Language Communities.

Degrees and Education

Ph.D. Anthropology, Linguistic and Cultural The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), New York, NY

Research Description

Urban anthropology, postcolonialism, semiotics, history/memory, materiality, migration, language politics, poetics, spatiotemporal imaginaries (chronotopes), the dead/ afterlives, revolution, the Middle East and North Africa, exile, the Mediterranean

Publications

Books

Streets of a Million Martyrs: Poetics and Politics in Urban Algeria. (Under Review at the University of Chicago Press)

Bullaro, G. R. & Stephanie V Love. 2016. The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137590626

Peer-Reviewed Articles

Love, Stephaie V. In Press. Archives of Displacement: Vernacular History and Urban Cemeteries in Oran, Algeria. Comparative Studies in Society and History.

Cavanaugh, Jillian R., Stephanie V. Love, and Nikhil Sood. 2025. “Interdiscursivity: Conventions, Gaps, and Renegades.” Annual Review of Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-072623-023919.

Love, Stephanie V. 2025. Colonialism’s Mortal Remains: Semiotic Landscapes of Ambivalence in Oran, Algeria. Semiotic Review. Special Issues: Place, eds. Jeffery A. Tolbert & Bryan Rupert. https://www.semioticreview.com/

Love, Stephanie V. 2024. The King of Martyrs: Poetic Parallelism and Postcolonial Publics in Urban Algeria. American Ethnologist, 51(4): 592-604. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13347

Love, Stephanie V. 2023. Echoes of ‘Dead’ Colonialism: The Voices and Materiality of a (Post)colonial Algeria­n Newspaper. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 33(1): 72-91. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12392

Love, Stephanie V. 2021. The Poetics of Grievance: Taxi-drivers, Vernacular Placenames, and the Paradoxes of Postcoloniality in Oran, Algeria. City  & Society 33(3): 422-443.  https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ciso.12412

Love, Stephanie V. 2021. “Are we not of interest to each other?” A pedagogy of presence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anthropology Now! 13(2): 65-76. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19428200.2021.1973330

Love, Stephanie V. & L. Wu. 2020. Are We in the Same Boat? Ethnographic Lessons of Sheltering in Place from International Seafarers and Algerian Harraga in the Age of Global  Pandemic. Anthropology Now! April 2020 issue. https://anthronow.com/press-watch/are-we-in-the-same-boat-ethnographic-lessons-of-sheltering-in-place-from-international-seafarers-and-algerian-harraga-in-the-age-of-global-pandemic

Love, Stephanie V. 2019. Decolonizing the Church/Decolonizing Language: Postcolonial Christianity, Language Ideologies, and the Morality of Teaching Vernacular Arabic (Darija) in Algeria. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education,18(1): 25-38. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15348458.2019.1575740

Love, Stephanie V. 2016. ‘Broken Arabic’ and Ideologies of Completeness: Contextualizing the Category of ‘Native’ and ‘Heritage’ Speaker in the University Arabic Classroom. Bellaterra Journal of Teaching and Learning Language and Literature, 9(2): 78-93. https://raco.cat/index.php/Bellaterra/article/view/310698 

Love, Stephanie V. 2016. An Educated Identity: The School as a Modernist Chronotope in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels. In G. R. Bullaro and S. Love (eds.), The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins (pp. 71-97). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bullaro, Grace R. & Stephanie V. Love. 2016. Beyond the Margins: Ferrante Fever and Italian Female Writing. In G. R. Bullaro and S. Love (eds.), The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins (pp. 1-12). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137590626

Love, Stephanie V. & Dora Kotai. 2015. The Invisible Learners in the Classroom: Macro-Level Politics and Micro-Level Experiences of LESLLA in Italy. In M. Santos & A. Whiteside, Proceedings from the 9th annual LESLLA (low educated second language and literacy acquisition) symposium. City College of San Francisco.

Love, Stephanie V. 2014. Mother Tongue: Identity in the Translingual and Transnational Narratives of Carmine Abate and Cristina Ali Farah. In G. R. Bullaro & E. Banelli (Eds.), Shifting and Shaping a National Identity in a Pluricultural Society: Transnational Writers in Italy Today (pp. 107-127). Leicester, UK: Troubador Italian Studies Series. https://www.amazon.com/Shifting-Shaping-National-Identity-Pluriculturalism/dp/1783063785

Love, Stephanie V. 2014. Language Testing, ‘Integration’ and Subtractive Multilingualism in Italy: Challenges for Adult Immigrant Second Language and Literacy Education. Current Issues in Language Planning, 15(3/4). Special issue. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14664208.2014.947017

Love, Stephanie V. & Manka Varghese. 2012. The Historical and Contemporary Role of Race, Language, and Schooling in Italy’s Immigrant Policies: Public Discourses and Pedagogies. International Journal of Multicultural Education, 14(2). Special Issue: Challenging Anti-Immigration Discourses in School and Community Contexts. (with M. Varghese). https://ijme-journal.org/index.php/ijme/article/view/491