New Appointment: Dr Serge Sagna

Wednesday 29 August 2012

We are delighted to welcome Dr Serge Sagna to the School.

Serge has been awarded a prestigious ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellowship, and he chose SMG as the research centre to work in. We started preparing the application in July 2011: it involved first the University competition, where half of the potential applicants were allowed to go forward, and then a two-round nation-wide application scheme run by the ESRC. Serge comes from Senegal, where he took a BA in English linguistics. He then went to Paris (Denis Diderot) for his MA, next to the School of Oriental and African Studies for an MPhil in field linguistics, and from there to SOAS for his PhD in Linguistics. He works on the Gújjolaay Eegimaa language (which is an Atlantic language, within the large Niger-Congo family); he works in particular on its interesting system of nominal classification (gender), hence his connection to SMG. His mentors in SMG are Greville Corbett, Matthew Baerman, Oliver Bond and Dunstan Brown. Serge’s arrival, soon after that of Olly Bond, means that SMG now has worthwhile expertise in the languages of Africa.

Please visit Serge’s web page: http://manchester.academia.edu/SergeSagna/ResearchInterests