Our Mythical Childhood…The Reception of Classical Antiquity in Children’s and Young Adults’ Culture in Response to Regional and Global Challenges

European Research Council Consolidator Grant 2015 in collaboration with the Center for Studies on the Classical Tradition, Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, Univerity of Warsaw,Poland

(2016-2021)

This is a five-year project funded by the European Research Council and hosted by the University of Warsaw in Poland and links four other universities:

1. University of New England , Australia (Elizabeth Hale)
2. Roehampton University, UK (Susan Dacy and Sonya Nevin)
3. University of Yaoundé I, Cameroon (Daniel Nkemleke)
4. Bar Ilan University, Israel (Lisa Maurice)

The project consists in comparative studies of differing reception models not only across Europe but also America, Australia & New Zealand and in parts of the world not commonly associated with Graeco-Roman tradition: Africa and Asia.

Principal investigator (PI): Professor Katarzyna Marciniak (kamar@al.uw.edu.pl).

Up-coming events: Conferences & Volumes

• Myth: conference in May 2017, papers in August 2017, volume in Summer 2018
• History: conference in May 2019, papers in August 2019, volume in Summer 2020
• Nature: conference in May 2020, papers in August 2020, volume in Summer 2021

Georg Forster Postdoctoral Scholarship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, TU Chemnitz (2007-2008)

From 2007-2008 (Germany) obtained a Georg Forster Postdoctoral Scholarship to undertake corpus linguistics work at TU Chemnitz

Description: The search for the development of a standard Cameroonian variety of English that is comparable with the standard varieties of English in other countries and that can be regarded as the norm of educated usage and a model for English teaching and learning in Cameroon has been the major pre-occupation of linguists working to document distinctive features of Cameroon English (CamE) in the past several years. One way of achieving this objective is to rely on the capacity and potential that modern computer-based language corpora offer. Within Cameroon, an electronic database of written English already exists. But because this database is not linguistically annotated, descriptive studies of the type needed to meet the above-stated goal have not been possible. The aim of the project was to annotate the one-million-work corpus (general purpose) and an equivalent academic writing corpus (specific purpose) of Cameroon English text.

Humboldt Alumni Prize Award for Innovative Network Initiative

In June 2014 was awarded a Humboldt Alumni Prize for Innovative Network Initiative with a project entitled: “Intra-African/German Network of Academic Writing Excellence in the Humanities: mentoring junior scientists for successful Humboldt applications”.

Description:This network of five African countries (Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Tanzania)and Germany aims to raise awareness of the Humboldt scholarship opportunities, to junior scientists within the university communities; and to create a platform to mentor them, in view of optimizing their chances for successful Humboldt applications in the short and long run. The network involves 8 universities and alumni (senior and junior scientists) in linguistics, literatures, history, law, philosophy, germistik, and performing and visual arts.

Objectives

The network aims to achieve the following three major objectives:

• identify potential junior scientists in the target universities in  Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, and Kenya, in the Humanities, and link them in  a mentoring group  forum
• achieve a reasonable increase in successful applications for the  Humboldt scholarship in the Humanities, from Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and  Tanzania in the short run
• sustain dialogue with partners in Germany on research and publication opportunities for the benefit of junior scientists, in view of preparing them for the Humboldt scholarship

Senior Fulbright Award, University of Massachusetts at Boston (2010-2011)

In September 2010 obtained a Senior Fulbright grant to tag a spoken corpus of Cameroon English at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

Description: This project transcribed and annotated parts of a 100,000-word corpus of Cameroon spoken English texts available on CD-ROM, using computer software and manually. The project is part of a wider corpus linguistic research enterprise started by the Department of English of the University of Yaoundé I in 1992. This database is intended to be a complement to the existing one-million-word written corpus compiled 16 years ago, and which I developed in Germany with a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Nkemleke 2008). The corpus will be useful for language research, teaching and learning in universities in Cameroon and abroad, especially among our ICE (International Corpus of English) project partners. A major benefit of the project for Cameroon is technology transfer in the area of computer-based linguistics, especially future text processing via software.