Contributors
Contributors
Enoch O. Aboh is professor of linguistics at the University of Amsterdam and a founding member and co-organizer of the African Linguistics School (ALS). Aboh investigates the learnability of human language with a special focus on comparative syntax, language creation, and language change. His empirical focus lies on Kwa (Niger-Congo), Romance, Germanic, Atlantic creoles, and sign languages. Aboh’s main publications include The Emergence of the Hybrid Grammars (Cambridge University Press, 2015 and The Morphosyntax of the Head-Complement Sequences (Oxford University Press, 2004). He is engaged in working toward a mutually enriching exchange of knowledge between the Global North and the Global South.
Felix Ameka is emeritus professor of ethnolinguistic vitality and diversity in the world at the University of Leiden. Ameka’s primary research interests are the quest for the meaning of linguistic signs and exploring their use in social interaction, language documentation, and description as well as multilingualism. His empirical specialization is West African languages— mainly Kwa languages and other languages of wider communication, namely, Hausa and Fulfulde. His focus is on Gbe (e.g., Ewe, Gen, Aja, and Fon); Ghana-Togo-Mountain languages, especially Likpe; and Guang and Akanic languages.
James Essegbey is professor of African languages and linguistics at the University of Florida. Essegbey’s research interests include the description and documentation of endangered languages, syntax-semantics interface, the varieties of English spoken by people of African descent, and the influence of African languages on creoles. He works on the Kwa languages of West Africa, especially Gbe (e.g., Ewe, Gen, Aja, and Fon), Akan, and Ghana-Togo Mountain (GTM) languages (e.g., Nyangbo and Animere). He also investigates the influence of the Gbe languages on Suriname creoles.
Katharine Gerbner is an associate professor of history and the director of the Religious Studies Program at the University of Minnesota. Her research examines the history of race and religion, Caribbean and Atlantic History, and theories of conversion. Her first book, Christian Slavery: Conversation and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), shows how religion was fundamental to the development of slavery and race in the early modern Atlantic world. Her second book, Archival Irruptions (Duke University Press, 2025), examines the construction of religion and the criminalization of Obeah in eighteenth-century Jamaica.
Louise Sebro is a museum curator at the Museum of Lolland-Falster, Denmark. Sebro studies the history of colonialism, focusing on questions of identity, networks, and daily life. She is the author of Mellem afrikaner og kreol: etnisk identitet og social navigation i Dansk Vestindien 1730–1770 (Lund University Press, 2010), which examines Damma’s life and cultural creolization in the Danish West Indies.
Peter Stein is emeritus professor of romance philology who taught at several universities in and outside Germany, including Humboldt University Berlin and, most recently, the University of Bremen. His research examines historical Romance Linguistics and French and Dutch Creole Studies. He has published more than 100 articles and volumes, including about forty articles relating to Virgin Islands Dutch Creole. He is the editor of C.G.A. Oldendorp’s Criolisches Wörterbuch (1996) and one of the editors of the four volumes of the original manuscript of C.G.A. Oldendorp’s Geschichte der Mission der Evangelischen Brüder auf den caraibischen Inseln Sanct Thomas, Sanct Croix und Sanct Jan (2000-2002).
Cefas Van Rossem is a Dutch teacher at Olympus College in Arnhem and a guest researcher in the Department of Variational Linguistics at the Meertens Institute (Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences) in Amsterdam. He archives and studies Virgin Islands Dutch Creole texts and, with Hein Van der Voort, he published Die Creol Taal: 250 years of Negerhollands texts (Amsterdam University Press, 1996). He regularly updates a comprehensive bibliography of texts in or about Virgin Islands Dutch Creole on his website and hosts the podcast Di hou creol on this topic as well.
Masthead image: Geometric gold weight (18th–19th century), Akan artist. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Ernst Anspach, 1994. www.metmuseum.org.
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