Sonya Rao

Sonya Rao is a legal and linguistic anthropologist. She received her Ph.D. at UCLA in Anthropology in 2021, where she wrote a dissertation on working conditions and labor organizing of language interpreters in U.S. immigration courts. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation program in Law and Social Sciences. Previously, she has served as the ABF/AccessLex Postdoctoral Scholar in Legal and Higher Education. She is currently the ABF/NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Law and Inequality, where she is researching the state of training for law students and early career attorneys to work across languages and is working on a book based on her dissertation, tentatively titled, Privatizing Language Work: Interpreters and Access in U.S. Immigration Court.