Professor Antia explores the apartheid insights in Heidelberg schools

Professor Antia explores the apartheid insights in Heidelberg schools

Professor Dr. Bassey Antia from the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, has received a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This enables him to do a four-month research stay at the Heidelberg University of Education in the summer semester of 2025. Like that Heidelberg University of Education reports, Antia is a respected expert in the field of applied linguistics and has a long-standing cooperation with the university, in particular with Professor Dr. Karin Vogt from the English department.

Antia had previously worked as a DAAD visiting professor at the university and worked with Vogt from 2021 to 2022 on a project to research multilingual and multimodal assessment. This collaboration led to the creation of a network of experts from the global north and south, particularly South Africa, in the field of multilingualism and multilingual assessment.

Focus on cultural representation

As part of his current stay, Antia's research focuses on cultural representations in apartheid-era textbooks in South Africa. He wants to show how applied linguistics can support a decolonial future for postcolonial societies. During his stay, the topic of multilingual assessment will also be discussed, which provides an important basis for the development of cooperative formats between Germany and South Africa.

The importance of multilingualism is also proven by studies that show that it breaks down communication barriers and facilitates access to different cultures. Multilingual people have an increased ability to concentrate and can resolve conflicts better. This underlines the relevance of the topics Antia explores, as multilingualism is not only a skill but also a key resource in the globalized world, as shown on avhmontreal.ca is reported.

Academic career and awards

Bassey Antia studied French and translation in Calabar and Lagos (Nigeria) and received her doctorate from Bielefeld University in 1999. His academic career took him to countries such as Spain, Canada and Great Britain. He is a fellow of the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Among his numerous awards, he received the Eugen Wüster Prize in 2016 for contributions to the field of terminology. Antia currently works as Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape and also holds visiting professorships at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) and Rhodes University Makhanda (South Africa).

This diversity of experiences and international networking characterize Antia not only as a scientific researcher, but also as a bridge builder between different cultures and scientific disciplines. This is also reflected in the participation in important congresses, such as the 35th Linguistic Colloquium, where interdisciplinary methods of cognitive science and linguistics were presented, which offered a wide scope for topics such as multilingualism and translation ( peterlang.com ).