Members

Koen Bostoen (°1975) has been a professor of African Linguistics and Swahili at Ghent University since 2011. His research focuses on the historical-comparative study of Bantu languages and on interdisciplinary approaches to the African past. He obtained an ERC Starting Grant for the KongoKing project (2012-2016) and an ERC Consolidator’s Grant for the BantuFirst project (2018-2022). Amongst others, he is the author of Des mots et des pots en bantou: une approche linguistique de l’histoire de la céramique en Afrique (2005, Peter Lang) and co-editor of Studies in African Comparative Linguistics, with Special Focus on Bantu and Mande (2005, RMCA), The Kongo Kingdom: Origins, Dynamics and Cosmopolitan Culture of an African Polity (2018, Cambridge University Press), Une archéologie des provinces septentrionales du royaume Kongo (2018, Archaeopress), The Bantu Languages, 2nd edition (2019, Taylor and Francis) and On reconstructing Proto-Bantu grammar (2022, Language Science Press). Publications

Inge Brinkman (°1964) is Professor of African Studies at Ghent University. Her research crosscuts the fields of African literature, popular culture and history with a focus on Kenya and Angola. For her PhD dissertation at Leiden University, she examined literature, identity and gender in Central Kenya. During a post-doctoral project at Cologne University, she studied violence and exile through fieldwork with refugees from South-East Angola. At the Leiden African Studies Centre, she carried out historical research on communication technologies, mobility and social relations in Africa. She has published several books and contributed articles to various renowned journals of African Studies. Publications

Gilles-Maurice de Schryver (°1971) has been research professor of African Linguistics at Ghent University since 2015, and extraordinary professor at the University of Pretoria since 2014. He holds an MSc in Microelectronic Engineering (1995), as well as an MA (1999) and PhD (2005) in African Languages and Cultures. In 2002 he co-founded TshwaneDJe HLT, and in 2006 he was a founding member of African Language Technology. He is the author or co-author of about 350 books, book chapters, journal articles and conference papers, mainly on Bantu corpus linguistics and lexicography. His publications also include award-winning dictionaries for Northern Sotho, Zulu and Xhosa, published with Oxford University Press, as well as various online dictionaries, amongst others the most popular one for Swahili. Publications

Peter Coutros (°1986) has been a postdoctoral researcher with the BantuFirst project since early 2021. He received his PhD in anthropology from Yale University in 2017. For his dissertation, he directed the DARE project, focused on the  reconstruction of the Late Stone Age/Early Iron Age socio-ecological landscape of the Diallowali site system in northern Senegal. He was previously a visiting assistant professor of archaeology at Wesleyan University and a postdoctoral fellow of archaeology at the University of Puget Sound. He has particular interest in ceramic seriation, resilience, and the social impacts of climate change. In addition to Senegal, he has conducted archaeological and palaeoenvironmental research in Mali, Mauritania, Kenya, Madagascar, Peru, Guatemala, and Mongolia.

Jessamy Doman (°1983) has been a BantuFirst postdoctoral researcher since early 2022 to work on the reconstruction of diets and environments. She obtained her PhD from the Department of Anthropology, Yale University, in 2017. She led several expeditions in Kenya with the Baringo Palaeontological Research Project (BPRP), resulting in a new understanding of the environmental context of early human evolution and developing novel methods in palaeoecological reconstruction. Her past research projects include Miocene-Pliocene faunal and human evolution in Africa and its climatic backdrop; extinction and replacement across the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary; social and environmental transitions in Holocene West Africa; repatriation of Native American artifacts and remains under the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act; and the use of natural history collections in the study of climate change patterns. She worked as a forensic anthropologist at the Defense POW MIA Accounting Agency, utilizing DNA and isotope sampling and osteological analysis to identify and repatriate unaccounted-for US service members.

Heidi Goes (°1976) has Bachelor (1997) and Master (1999) degrees in African Languages and Cultures from Ghent University with a MA thesis on the Esperanto-movement in Africa, which she published as a book titled Afero de Espero (2007) along with a number of articles and a book (Movadaj insuletoj, 2018) about the history of the Esperanto-movement in Indonesia. In 2022 she obtained her PhD at Ghent University on phonological and morphological variation in the Kikongo Language Cluster (West-Coastal Bantu) with a special focus on Cabinda. Since 2020, she has been teaching assistant in African Linguistics within the UGent African Languages and Cultures program. Publications

Hilde Gunnink (°1989) is a postdoctoral researcher conducting an FWO-funded project on prehistoric language contact between Bantu and Khoisan languages in Southern Africa. She obtained her PhD in 2018 at Ghent University. Her dissertation provides a grammatical description of the previously underdescribed Bantu language Fwe, spoken in Zambia and Namibia. She is also affiliated with Leiden University as a lecturer in linguistics and African languages and cultures. Her research interests are descriptive and historical linguistics of Bantu languages, as well as language contact between Bantu and non-Bantu languages in the past and present. Publications

Guy Kouarata (°1969) has been a postdoctoral researcher in linguistics within the BantuFirst project since the end of 2020. In 2014 he obtained his PhD in Linguistics from the Lyon 2 University. His dissertation focused on the phonological and morphological reconstruction of Proto-Mbochi (Bantu, C20). With 20 years of experience in linguistic research, Guy Kouarata has worked as a postdoctoral researcher for the BULB project at the LPP lab in Paris (CNRS), for KongoKing project at Ghent University and with SIL-Congo. Since 2005, he has been a lecturer at the University Marien Ngouabi in Brazzaville. Having worked on various Bantu languages of Congo-Brazzaville, including Bekwel (A80), Teke (B70), Lingala (C30), Mbochi (C20) and Beembe (H10), his work focuses on the dialectology, lexicography, phonology, spelling, grammar, documentation and reconstruction of Bantu languages.

Minah Nabirye (°1972) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Languages and Cultures of Ghent University. She is conducting a BOF-funded project on duplication processes in Lusoga morphosyntax. She obtained her PhD in 2016 at Ghent University. Her  dissertation provides a description of a  corpus-based grammar of Lusoga – a Bantu language spoken by roughly 3 million people in Eastern Uganda in the kingdom of Busoga. She is affiliated to Kyambogo University in Uganda where she is part of the team that trains teachers of the indigenous languages taught in primary and secondary schools. Her research  mostly focuses on language documentation and description plus the use of corpora in the study of lexicography, grammar and morphosyntax. Publications

Sara Pacchiarotti (°1982) was a postdoctoral researcher within the BantuFirst project until the end of October 2020. She is passionate about historical linguistics and diachronic language change in general. As a member of the BantuFirst project, she focused on the internal classification of West-Coastal Bantu languages based on shared phonological innovations. She is currently carrying out FWO-funded post-doctoral research on morphological reconstruction and morphosyntactic change within West-Coastal Bantu. In 2017 she obtained her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Oregon. A revised version of her dissertation on Bantu applicative constructions involving *-ɪd, with special emphasis on “misbehaving” applicative forms in Tswana, was published in the Stanford Monographs in African Languages series in 2020. Besides West-Coastal Bantu languages spoken in the homeland such as Ngwi B861 [nlo], Sara has worked on Bribri [bzd] (Chibchan, Costa Rica) and Mòoré [mos] (Gur, Burkina Faso). Publications

Milkessa Edae (1987) has been working as an assistant lecturer of Folklore and Cultural Studies at the Department of Oromo Folklore and Literature at Jimma University in Ethiopia. His area of research involves folklore, culture, ecology, oral literature, and indigenous healing practices, and he has contributed to many journal articles and book reviews. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate in African studies at GHent University in Belgium, in a project titled “Oral narratives as an ecological crisis coping strategies. Arsi Oromo of Eastern Ethiopia in focus”.

Lorenzo Maselli (°1996) is a FWO PhD fellow associated with the BantuFirst project whose main research interests lie within the fields of acoustic phonetics, articulation, phonological theory and typology, language documentation and African linguistics. After obtaining a BA degree in Italian studies from Università degli Studi di Padova (partner institution: Scuola Galileiana di Studi Superiori), Lorenzo moved to Pisa to study at the Scuola Normale Superiore (taking classes in phonetics and general linguistics). During this time, Lorenzo had the opportunity to do fieldwork in Ethiopia and take classes at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and at the University of California – Davis (LSA 70th Summer Institute). After graduating, Lorenzo moved to Paris for a year as an invited researcher at LLACAN, focussing on the phonetics of some Nigerian and Ethiopian varieties. Lorenzo is now working on the phonetic documentation of undescribed Bantu varieties spoken by some hunter-gatherer and farmer communities of the Southern Congolian forest-savannah mosaic.

Megersa Regassa Tolasa (°1989) holds a BA of Educaton at the Department of Oromo Folklore and Literature at Jimma University (2009-2011) and a MA Oromo Folklore and Cultural Studies at the same university (2013-2014) with a thesis titled “Indigenous Conflict Resolution Mechanisms among the Oromo: The Case of Reejjii and Jigaa Institutions in Oomoo Naaddaa”. Currently, he is an assistant professor at the Department of Oromo Folklore and Literature, Jimma University, and a Ph.D. candidate at Ghent University, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Department of Languages and Cultures. His joint Nascere Ph.D. project is titled “Monster Narratives in Oromo Oral Culture: A Gendered Perspective.” and he is participating as a member in the project “Storytelling and young people coping with crisis: Oral narratives and crisis management in Kenya and Ethiopia.” with other colleagues.

Sifra Van Acker (°1994) is a PhD student within the BantuFirst project. She studied African Languages and Cultures at Ghent University, where she obtained her Master degree in 2018. She did linguistic research for her BA and MA dissertation. She made a documentation and description of Kisamba (L12a), a language belonging to the Kikongo Language Cluster. Apart from some basic vocabulary lists collected for genealogical classification, neither Kisamba documentation nor description were available before this research. For this research she conducted linguistic fieldwork from August up to October 2016 in the Kwilu province in the DRC. Publications

Mary Zacharia Charwi (°1971) has permanent affiliation with the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) in the Department of Languages and Literature of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Dar es Salaam University College of Education (DUCE). She holds a PhD in African Linguistics from the University of Bayreuth, Germany and a MA (Linguistics) and BA (Education) from UDSM. Currently, she is Assistant to the Principal at DUCE. She teaches Swahili linguistic courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels: Swahili Morphology, Swahili Syntax, Swahili Semantics & Pragmatics, and Swahili Lexicography. Her area of research/consultancy specialization is Bantu Linguistics, more specifically Bantu Morphosyntax, Swahili Morphology, Swahili Syntax, Swahili Semantics & Pragmatics, and Bantu Lexicography. Before joining DUCE, Mary Charwi spent 17 years teaching in Primary School. Publications