Ansioluettelo

https://www.helsinki.fi/en/helsinki-collegium-advanced-studies

Koulutustiedot

I started out at the University of Cologne (Germany), where I studied African linguistics, general linguistics and phonetics and graduated with an MA thesis on noun-verb distinction in the Mande language Bambara. My interest in Bambara led me to spend a year at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Africaines (INALCO) in Paris to take intensive Bambara classes and immerse myself more in the histories and cultures of the region where this Mande  language is spoken. Two months spent in Bamako with a host family solidified my interest in Mande languages in general, and I decided to work on the argument structure of an undescribed Mande language for my PhD. This research, on Jalonke, a small Mande language spoken in the Futa Jalon area of Guinea, was funded through a PhD scholarship at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, in the Language and Cognition Group. I left Nijmegen for London in 2003 to embark on a PostDoc at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). I continued my academic career at SOAS until leaving for Helsinki in 2019, and maintain my connection to SOAS as a Professorial Research Associate.

Tutkimuksen ja opetuksen kuvaus

I generally teach courses on, e.g.,  multilingualism, language development, education and language learning from a multilingual perspective, language and writing, Atlantic languages, dynamics of language use in West African societies in two new study tracks the BA and MAprogramme in languages. These study tracks, AMY and KIGY, focus on  multilingualism as a social practice and focal languages in their social settings in one of the world's longstanding and dynamic multilingual settings: the Indian ocean space.

I am interested in supervising PhD students whose research topics are related to my areas of specialisation (Mande and Atlantic languages of West Africa; verbal argument structure and nominal classification systems; multilingualism in society and education; multilingual writing). I am not able to respond to supervision requests in any areas not listed here.