Before coming to IU in 1985, he was the Director of the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Ethnomusicology (now known as the Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies) at the University of Texas and a faculty member in the UT Department of Anthropology.
[3] This book inspired other scholars to begin exploring how people's ideas about how language functions shapes their linguistic practices.
More recently, he has co-written a book with Charles L. Briggs Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality.
Bauman and Briggs won the Edward Sapir Prize for this book from the Society for Linguistic Anthropology in November 2006.
[8] In addition to Charles L. Briggs, his numerous scholarly collaborators include Roger D. Abrahams,[9] Joel Sherzer,[10] Américo Paredes,[11][12] and his wife, the folklorist and anthropologist Beverly J.