Prof. Dr. Michael Meeuwis

Curriculum Vitae

• Born June 1, 1968 in Leiderdorp, The Netherlands;
• MA in African History and Philology, Ghent University, 1990;
• MA in General Linguistics, Universities of Antwerp and Amsterdam, 1991;
• PhD, A sociolinguistic-ethnographic study of the Congolese community in Belgium, University of Antwerp, 1997;
• Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders, 1997-2002;
• Professor of Anthropological Linguistics, University of Amsterdam, 2001-2002;
• Professor of Lingala and African Socioinguistics, Ghent University, 2002 - present day.

Research

My domains of interest include

• Lingála: Grammatical description; Emergence and history; Sociolinguistic, missionary, and political history and situation;
• History of the European production of 'knowledge' (history of the human and social sciences) in African colonial contexts, in particular in the Belgian Congo; consequences for present-day coloniality of knowledge
• History of colonization and missionary in Africa; and Europe-Africa representations and imaginations
• Theory formation and description in Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics; Linguistic Anthropology
• The sociolinguistics of the Democratic Republic of the Congo;
• General African socio- and political linguistics.
• Epistemological coloniality and decoloniality