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David Divita, a sociocultural linguist and linguistic anthropologist, specializes in Spanish- and French-speaking people and places. His interests include the linguistic and semiotic dimensions of aging; the experience of migration, displacement and long-term multilingualism; and the politics of history and memory—in particular as these phenomena operate among populations with national and affective attachments to contemporary Spain and France.

His book was published by the University of Toronto Press in March 2024. Untold Stories features a full-length ethnography of a community of aging Spaniards who were born around the time of Spain’s civil war (1936-1939), came of age during its repressive aftermath, and migrated to France as young adults in search of economic opportunity. Through detailed analysis of their conversational interactions, Prof. Divita shows how history lives among individuals in later life—not as a static domain of facts and figures, but in the narrative forms that animate or haunt their everyday encounters. A Spanish-language version of the book was published by Postmetropolis Editorial (Madrid) in early 2025. (An interview about Untold Stories can be accessed on the .)

Prof. Divita has also written about political rhetoric and far-right populism in contemporary Spain; language ideologies and discursive practices that concern domestic service in the United States; and the use of English in French gay-lifestyle media. Recently, he has been investigating the experience of gay men in midlife and how they make sense of the process of aging. His current project spotlights those who came of age sexually in the shadow of AIDS—that is, men born in the 1970s and early 80s whose lives were less likely to be directly affected by the epidemic than their predecessors, but whose sexual identities were indelibly shaped by notions of risk and mortality. How does that experience inform perceptions of age and networks of kinship among gay men in midlife today? Prof. Divita is drawing on qualitative methods and archival research to answer this and related questions.

In addition to the books mentioned above, Prof. Divita has published articles in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Language in Society, Journal of Sociolinguistics, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Discourse & Society, and Journal of Language, Culture and Society, among others.