New colleague in Postcolonial Language Studies

Danae M. Perez joined the Postcolonial Language Studies team in September 2016 funded by a Swiss National Science Foundation PostDoc Mobility grant. She received her PhD in Linguistics and Anthropology at the University of Zurich in 2015 on language shift in a former English-speaking colony in Paraguay and is currently carrying out research into Afro-Iberian speech varieties. Her research interests are contact linguistics, creole studies, and linguistic anthropology.

More information on Danae's work can be found here (University of Zurich website).

Welcome to Bremen, Danae!

Fieldwork on Nalik and Tok Pisin

In September 2016, Lidia Federica Mazzitelli (Postcolonial Language Studies) conducted fieldwork on Nalik, an Austronesian Language, and Tok Pisin, an English-based creole, in the village Laraibina, New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea.

Lidia’s research focuses on the semantics of landscape and orientation systems. She has investigated the lexical and morphosyntactic means used to express landscape semantics in Nalik and Tok Pisin: words that describe landscape entities (‘sea’, ‘mountain’), deictics, directional particles (in Nalik a North-to-West directional system is found), movement verbs. The aim of the project is to understand how the two languages categorize and define landscape objects and how they encode landscape semantics in their grammars. Lidia also began a documentation project on the so far undescribed and undocumented language Lakurumau, spoken in only one village in New Ireland. Lidia’s fieldtrip was part of the cooperation activities of the Oceania theme semester (http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/schwerpunkt/ozeanien/default.aspx) supported by the Internationalization Funds of the University of Bremen. In New Ireland, Lidia worked in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Craig Volker (http://www.poco.uni-bremen.de/people.html) who was a visiting lecturer at Postcolonial Language Studies in April/May 2016.

Amerika-Semester

Aztekisch, Brasilianisches Portugiesisch, Michif, Papiamentu, Afro-Yungueño, Yukatekisches Maya, Amerikanisches Englisch, und mehr… 

Die Sprachen und Kulturen Amerikas, ihre Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft, ihre Strukturen und Anwendungsbereiche und ihre Bedeutung für aktuelle wissenschaftliche Diskurse und Forschung. Die Postcolonial Language Studies des Fachbereichs 10 der Universität Bremen bieten gemeinsam mit den Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Studies, der CU Koloniallinguistik, den Studiengängen English-Speaking Cultures und Romanische Sprachwissenschaft sowie nationalen und internationalen Gästen im Wintersemester 2016/2017 einen interdisziplinären Themenschwerpunkt an, der Studierende in Seminaren, Gastvorträgen und einem Workshop zu den Sprachen und Kulturen Amerikas – von Kanada bis Bolivien – die Vielfalt dieses faszinierenden Doppelkontinents näherbringen und dessen zentrale Bedeutung in (post)kolonialen Theorien verdeutlichen soll.

Mehr Informationen: http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/schwerpunkt/amerika/default.aspx

Postcolonial movie nights

All welcome!