Fokelien Kootstra-Ford is a Guest Professor in Arabian Epigraphy and Arabic Historical Linguistics at Ghent University. She is currently the PI on the AlUla Inscriptions Analysis Project (AICAP) in collaboration with the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU). This four-year project will bring together a team of IT-developers and specialists on the various scripts and languages represented in the epigraphic landscape of AlUla to construct a database to collect and analyze the epigraphic heritage of AlUla county. Besides its academic focus, the project is committed to investing in the education of AlUla’s next generation, both through the inclusion of mentoring- and internship programs in its organization, as well as through a well thought-out outreach plan. This combination of outreach, education, and comprehensive documentation and analysis of the written heritage that is part of the landscape of the AlUla county, will not only enhance our understanding of the long and rich history of its inhabitants, but also ensure its preservation for the future.
Fokelien trained as an Arabist (BA, 2011) and a Linguist (MA, 2014) at Leiden University. In 2019, she received her PhD in linguistics from the same university. She has held postdoctoral research fellowships at Ghent University (FWO, 2019-2024) and at Leiden University (2022), and a research fellowship at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) of New York University (2019-2020).
After finishing her PhD research on the writing culture of ancient Dadan in pre-Islamic Arabia, Fokelien’s postdoctoral research focused on the linguistic variation attested in the Arabic papyri from the first centuries following the Arab conquests (7th-9th cents. AD), taking a special interest in the distribution of variation. During 2022, as part of the work she did as a postdoctoral fellow on Petra Sijpesteijn’s ERC project ‘Embedding Conquests’ at Leiden University, she had a chance to further develop her historical sociolinguistic work on the early Arabic papyri, investigating the social dynamics of language-use and rhetoric in private requests.
