Network

About Us

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  Prof. Dr. Rose Marie Beck

  University of Leipzig,
  Germany

  Professor of Afrikanistik (Languages and Literatures)

• About:

  Prof. Dr. Rose Marie Beck is a linguistic anthropologist with interests in postcolonial linguistics and the sociology of linguistics. Her research interests have progressed from interaction and conversation analysis to ethnomethodology, praxeology and Science and Technology Studies. She has published about “speaking objects” and media in popular culture, HIV/AIDS prevention in Eastern Africa, on urban languages, language and development, and language philosophy. In 2010 she received an award for an article on HIV-prevention (Beck 2009, 2016) by the KfW for practically relevant development research, a study at the intersection of the sociology of knowledge production, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Regionally she focuses on Eastern Africa and Swahili, Herero (Namibia), but with some interests in Central and Southern Africa. Empirically she works in the fields of Swahili Studies, urban studies, medical anthropology, science and technology studies. She is principal investigator in the project „Recalibrating Afrikanistik”, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation 2019-2026 (2027), and “Doing the City” (DFG, 2017-2020).

  
  

  Contact:

  	Visit Website
  	rmbeck@uni-leipzig.de
  	+49 (0)341 - 97 37031
  	office: 2.2.05 (house 2, 2nd floor, room 05) consultation hour: We. 9:00-11:00 pm and upon appointment

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  Prof. Dr. Anne Storch

  University of Cologne,
  Germany

  Professor of African Studies

• About:

  African languages, in particular Benue-Congo, Nilotic and the Atlantic area. Fieldwork in Nigeria, Sudan, Uganda, Jamaica, Qatar, South Africa.

  My research combines cultural and social contexts and histories of languages, the semiotics of linguistic practices, epistemes and ontologies of colonial linguistics, but also linguistic description. I have contributed widely to the analysis, description and documentation of registers and choices, and focus on African languages not as systems and discrete entities, but as social practice, ways of speaking and parts of flexible and complex repertoires. I’m particularly interested in epistemic language, local metalinguistic knowledges, indirect communication, meaningful noise and silence. More recently, I have developed a research interest in the field of Critical Heritage Studies, exploring what makes languages part of ’intangible heritage’, associates them with emotion, prestige, and symbolic wealth.

  
  

  Contact:

  	astorch@uni-koeln.de
  	+49 (0)221 470 2708
  	Postal address: Institute for African Studies University of Cologne Albertus-Magnus-Platz 50923 Cologne Germany Office address: Meister-Ekkehart-Str. 7 2nd floor

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  Prof. Dr. Clarissa Vierke

  University of Bayreuth,
  Germany

  Professor of Literatures in African Languages

• About:

  Clarissa Vierke, born in 1979, has been professor of Literatures in African Languages at the University of Bayreuth since 2014. With a scholarship of the German National Merit Foundation, she studied African Languages, Anthropology and Literatures in African Languages at the University of Bayreuth and the Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden. She wrote her PhD about the specific poetics of a narrative peotic genre from the Swahili Coast in Eastern Africa. Since then, she has worked on manuscript cultures in Eastern Africa and travelling texts along the East African Coast from Kenya to Mozambique and across the Indian Ocean. She has also expanded her interest in Aesthetics to focus on other poetic genres.

  In 2012, she won the Wissenschaftspreis of the University of Bayreuth and the Heinz-Maier-Leibnitz-prize of the German Research Council (DFG).

  
  

  Contact:

  	clarissa.vierke@uni-bayreuth.de
  	+49 (0)921 / 55-3550
  	University of Bayreuth Literatures in African languages 95440 Bayreuth Room: Room: 1.10 (GW I) Fax: +49 (0)921 / 55-3641​