People

Principal Investigator

Koen Bostoen (°1975) has been professor of African Linguistics and Swahili at Ghent University since 2011. His research focuses on the study of Bantu languages and interdisciplinary approaches to the African past. He obtained an ERC Starting Grant for the KongoKing project (2012-2016) and an ERC Consolidator’s Grant for the BantuFirst project (2018-2022). He is author of Des mots et des pots en bantou: une approche linguistique de l’histoire de la céramique en Afrique (2005, Peter Lang) and co-editor of The Kongo Kingdom: Origins, Dynamics and Cosmopolitan Culture of an African Polity (2018, Cambridge University Press), Une archéologie des provinces septentrionales du royaume Kongo (2018, Archaeopress) and The Bantu Languages, 2nd edition (2019, Taylor and Francis).  List of Publications

Post-doctoral researchers

Peter Coutros (°1986) has been a postdoctoral researcher within the BantuFirst project since early 2021. He received his PhD in anthropology from Yale University in 2017. For his dissertation, he directed the DARE project, focused on the  reconstruction of the Late Stone Age/Early Iron Age socio-ecological landscape of the Diallowali site system in northern Senegal. He was previously a visiting assistant professor of archaeology at Wesleyan University and a postdoctoral fellow of archaeology at the University of Puget Sound. He has particular interest in ceramic seriation, resilience, and the social impacts of climate change. In addition to Senegal, he has conducted archaeological and palaeoenvironmental research in Mali, Mauritania, Kenya, Madagascar, Peru, Guatemala, and Mongolia.
Jessamy Doman (°1983) has been a BantuFirst postdoctoral researcher since early 2022 to work on the reconstruction of diets and environments. She obtained her PhD from the Department of Anthropology, Yale University, in 2017. She led several expeditions in Kenya with the Baringo Palaeontological Research Project (BPRP), resulting in a new understanding of the environmental context of early human evolution and developing novel methods in palaeoecological reconstruction. Her past research projects include Miocene-Pliocene faunal and human evolution in Africa and its climatic backdrop; extinction and replacement across the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary; social and environmental transitions in Holocene West Africa; repatriation of Native American artifacts and remains under the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act; and the use of natural history collections in the study of climate change patterns. She worked as a forensic anthropologist at the Defense POW MIA Accounting Agency, utilizing DNA and isotope sampling and osteological analysis to identify and repatriate unaccounted-for US service members.
Guy Kouarata (°1969) has been a postdoctoral researcher in linguistics within the BantuFirst project since the end of 2020. In 2014 he obtained his PhD in Linguistics from the Lyon 2 University. His dissertation focused on the phonological and morphological reconstruction of Proto-Mbochi (Bantu, C20). With 20 years of experience in linguistic research, Guy Kouarata has worked as a postdoctoral researcher for the BULB project at the LPP lab in Paris (CNRS), for KongoKing project at Ghent University and with SIL-Congo. Since 2005, he has been a lecturer at the University Marien Ngouabi in Brazzaville. Having worked on various Bantu languages of Congo-Brazzaville, including Bekwel (A80), Teke (B70), Lingala (C30), Mbochi (C20) and Beembe (H10), his work focuses on the dialectology, lexicography, phonology, spelling, grammar, documentation and reconstruction of Bantu languages.
Sara Pacchiarotti (°1982) was a postdoctoral researcher within the BantuFirst project until the end of October 2020. Now she is carrying FWO-funded post-doctoral research on morphosyntactic change in West-Coastal Bantu. In 2017 she obtained her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Oregon. Her dissertation focused on the different functions of Bantu applicative constructions involving *-ɪd, with special emphasis on “misbehaving” applicative forms in Tswana. Beyond Bantu, Sara has worked on Bribri (Chibchan, Costa Rica) and Mooré (Gur, Burkina Faso). She is currently also involved in a cooperation project between the Senegal-Oregon Center at the University of Oregon and the Centre de Linguistique Appliqué de Dakar (CLAD, Université Cheikh Anta Diop) to document some Jóola varieties. She is particularly interested in historical linguistics, (diachronic) syntax and language change. Publications

PhD Students

Lorenzo Maselli (°1996) is a FWO PhD fellow associated witht BantuFirst project whose main research interests lie within the fields of acoustic phonetics, articulation, phonological typology, language documentation and African linguistics. After obtaining a BA degree in Italian studies from Università degli Studi di Padova (partner institution: Scuola Galileiana di Studi Superiori), Lorenzo moved to Pisa to study at the Scuola Normale Superiore (taking classes in phonetics and general linguistics). During this time, Lorenzo had the opportunity to do fieldwork in Ethiopia and take classes at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and at the University of California – Davis (LSA 70th Summer Institute). After graduating, Lorenzo moved to Paris for a year as an invited researcher at LLACAN, focussing on the phonetics of some Nigerian and Ethiopian varieties. Lorenzo is now working on the phonetic documentation of undescribed Bantu varieties spoken by some hunter-gatherer communities of the Southern Congolian forest-savannah mosaic.
Sifra Van Acker (°1994) is a PhD student within the BantuFirst project. She studied African Languages and Cultures at Ghent University, where she obtained her Master degree in 2018. She did linguistic research for her BA and MA dissertation. She made a documentation and description of Kisamba (L12a), a language belonging to the Kikongo Language Cluster. Apart from some basic vocabulary lists collected for genealogical classification, neither Kisamba documentation nor description were available before this research. For this research she conducted linguistic fieldwork from August up to October 2016 in the Kwilu province in the DRC. Publications

Associated Researchers

Bernard Clist (°1958) has been conducting archaeological research in and on Central Africa since 1980. He has been Head of the Archaeology Department at the International Center for Bantu Studies in Libreville (CICIBA, Gabon, 1985 – 1996), did his PhD (2005) on the Neolithic to Iron Age periods of north-west Gabon, and carried out fieldwork in Angola, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Madagascar, and Zambia. Between 2012 and 2016, he co-ordinated the archaeological research on the Kongo kingdom with fieldwork in the DRC (2012-2015), and labwork in Angola, Belgium and Portugal. He was a postdoctoral researcher within the BantuFirst project until the end of September 2019. Publications
Gilles-Maurice de Schryver (°1971) has been research professor of African Linguistics at Ghent University since 2015, and extraordinary professor at the University of Pretoria since 2014. He holds an MSc in Microelectronic Engineering (1995), as well as an MA (1999) and PhD (2005) in African Languages and Cultures. In 2002 he co-founded TshwaneDJe HLT, and in 2006 he was a founding member of African Language Technology. He is the author or co-author of over 300 books, book chapters, journal articles and conference papers, mainly on Bantu corpus linguistics and lexicography. His publications also include award-winning dictionaries for Northern Sotho, Zulu and Xhosa, published with Oxford University Press, as well as various online dictionaries, amongst others the most popular one for Swahili. Publications

Jean-Pierre Donzo Bunza Yugia (°1963) is Professor of African Linguistics at the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique de la Gombe (Kinshasa / DR Congo). He obtained his joint PhD in African languages and Cultures at Ghent University and the Université Libre de Bruxelles (2015). He taught Lingala at Ghent University (Lingala II, 2021). His research focuses mainly on the descriptive linguistics and historical-comparative linguistics of the Bantu and Ubangian languages  as well as the documentation of endangered languages, especially those of pygmies of the DR Congo. Since 2009, he also works on lexicography, terminology and literacy tools as member of the DR Congo team for RAMAA, a UNESCO project and an institute for lifelong learning. Publications
Heidi Goes (°1976) has Bachelor (1997) and Master (1999) degrees in African Languages and Cultures from Ghent University with a MA thesis on the Esperanto-movement in Africa, which she published as a book titled Afero de Espero (2007) along with a number of articles and a book (Movadaj insuletoj, 2018) about the history of the Esperanto-movement in Indonesia. Since 2014 she has been doing PhD research on phonological and morphological variation in the Kikongo Language Cluster (West-Coastal Bantu) with a special focus on Cabinda. Her PhD research was funded by the Special Research Fund (BOF) of Ghent University through a Starting Grant granted to Koen Bostoen. Since 2020, she has been  teaching assistant  in African Linguistics within the UGent African Languages and Cultures program. Publications
 Heidi Goes's picture
Wannes Hubau (°1985) studied Bioscience Engineering (Land- and Forest management) at Ghent University (Belgium), where he earned his Magister degree in 2008. For his PhD (2008-2013) he explored ancient charcoal as a natural archive for vegetation and disturbance history in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2013-2014 he was a postdoctoral research fellow on the ERC-funded project T-FORCES (Leeds University, UK). During 2015-2018 he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Africamuseum (Tervuren, Belgium). He was a postdoctoral researcher within the BantuFirst project until the end of July 2020. In the course of his career, he studied vegetation responses on climate change at several timescales. Through charcoal and tree-ring analysis, he untangles tropical forest species turnover and tree age structure over the last hundreds and thousands of years. Through replicated tree measurements in permanent tropical forest inventory plots, he reconstructs the evolution of the tropical forest carbon sink over the last four decades, and predicts the future of the carbon sink under Earth’s changing environmental conditions. He led more than 10 field expeditions in four African tropical countries (Liberia, Ghana, Cameroon, D.R.Congo).  Publications
Katharina Jungnickel (°1987) is a PhD student associated to the BantuFirst project. She studied Prehistoric and Classical Archaeology at the University of Cologne, where she obtained her Master degree in 2017. She is interested both in European and African Archaeology. Her BA and MA research focused on demography and social conditions within Chamblandes burials in Western Switzerland, while she also carried out archaeological fieldwork in Sudan (2008-2009) and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2015-2016) within different research projects of the Cologne Institute for African Archaeology. Her FWO funded PhD research at UGent focuses on Contact Archaeology in Western Central Africa and involves a collaboration between the UGent Archaeology Department (Prof. P. Crombé), BantUGent (Prof. K. Bostoen) and the RMCA in Tervuren (Dr. E. Cornelissen).

Joseph Koni Muluwa (°1964) obtained his PhD degree from the Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) in 2011 and subsequently was post-doctoral researcher at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren (Belgium) and at Ghent University (Belgium). In 2016-2017 he was a visiting professor at Ghent University. He currently is lecturer in African Linguistics at the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique of Kikwit (Democratic Republic of the Congo). His research focuses on Guthrie’s B80 West-Coastal Bantu languages, many of which are endangered, and encompasses language documentation, historical-comparative linguistics, ethno-botany, and ethno-zoology. Publications
Igor Matonda Sakala (°1984) holds a joint PhD in African Languages and Cultures from Ghent University (UGent, 2017) and History, Art History and Archaeology from Brussels University (ULB, 2017), which he obtained as part of the KongoKing project. His PhD thesis focused on the the Inkisi Valley in the Era of the Kongo Kingdom and relied on historical, archaeological and linguistic data. Since 2018, he has been an Associate Professor at the University of Kinshasa (UNIKIN), more specifically at the Department of Historical Sciences. His teaching and research focus on African precolonial and colonial history, the early and more recent settlement and population history of the Congo, demographic history, historical archaeology, and ceramic traditions. Publications
Dirk Seidensticker (°1984) studied prehistoric archaeology, paleo-anthropology and geosciences at the Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, where he earned his Magister degree in 2010. His PhD (2017) was devoted to the settlement history of the north-western Congo Basin. As part of the research group of Manfred K. H. Eggert from 2007 to 2014 he participated in research in Cameroon. From 2015 to 2016 he was part of a research project at the University of Cologne and carried out fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Besides focusing on African archaeology, his work within the Digital Humanties includes data management and data base design as well as statistical analysis and reproducible research using computational methods. He was a postdoctoral researcher within the BantuFirst project until the end of September 2020. Publications

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