Saturday, September 2, 2017

New ICOS Board of Directors (2017-2020)



The new Board of Directors has been elected by the General Assembly on 1 September 2017 during the 26th International Congress of Onomastic Sciences in Debrecen. The General Assembly elected officers for the following positions: 1 President, 2 Vice‐Presidents, 1 Secretary, 1 Treasurer, 1 Assistant Secretary and Web Officer, 1 Postgraduate Representative (Non‐Executive) and 5 other Non‐Executive Members.





Meet our new board of directors:
Paula Sjöblom (Finland) - President


She is Senior Lecturer (from 2011), and Adjunct Professor (= Docent; from 2008) of Finnish language in the University of Turku, Finland. As of 2016 she has also been the Editor‐in‐Chief of Sananjalka, a multidisciplinary annual publication of the Finnish Language Society. Her main research interests are commercial names, names in language in relation to cognitive and functional linguistics, socio‐onomastics, marketing communications, language of advertising, and multimodality.

Urszula Bijak (Poland) - Vice-President

She holds a professor position at the Institute of the Polish Language at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków, Poland, since 1986. In 2014 she was awarded the title of Doctor of Sciences in linguistics by the aforementioned Institute, for the dissertation Hydronyms of the Vistula River Basin. Appellative‐derived Potamonyms. She obtained her PhD in linguistics at the same Institute in 1994, with a dissertation on Place Names of the Southern Part of the Former Mazovian Voivodship. Urszula Bijak’s research interests include Polish and Slavic onomastics, historical and contemporary processes of formation of geographical names, onomastic lexicography, etymology, and the standardization of geographical names.

Adrian Koopman (South Africa) - Vice-President
He is Emeritus Professor of the University of KwaZulu‐Natal. He retired at the end of 2012 after 37 years of teaching Zulu linguistics and literature on the Pietermaritzburg campus of this university. He was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by this university in 1995 for a thesis on Zulu language change. His research interests have always been in onomastics, particularly as relating to Zulu names and naming. He has published 62 articles in peer‐reviewed academic journals or chapters in books, and of these two‐thirds (41) have been on onomastics. Professor Koopman is a founder member of the Names Society of Southern Africa (NSSA) (since 1980), was Vice‐President of the NSA from 1998 to 2006, and President from 2006 to 2014.

Alina Bugheșiu (Romania) - Secretary

She is Lecturer at the Technical University of Cluj‐Napoca, North University Centre of Baia Mare, Romania. She obtained her PhD in onomastics at the West University of Timișoara in 2013, with a thesis on Trade Names in Contemporary Romanian Public Space. She has co‐edited (together with Oliviu Felecan) the multi‐author volume Onomastics in Contemporary Public Space 4 and she has published articles and research papers in academic journals, ISI‐ranked conference proceedings, and collective volumes. In addition to trade names, her research interests include virtual names, names in literature, the use of names in taboo discourse and humour, referential semantics, semiotics, philosophy of language, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. She is a member of ICOS and a Secretary of this organisation (2015–2017).

Emilia Aldrin (Sweden) - Treasurer

She is D. Phil. in Scandinavian Languages and Senior Lecturer in Swedish language at Halmstad University, School of Education, Humanities and Social sciences, Sweden. In addition to being a member of ICOS, she is also a Swedish representative in NORNA (The Nordic cooperative committee for onomastic research). Her research interests lie in the areas of socio‐onomastics and applied onomastics, more specifically centering around the notion of identity. Emilia Aldrin’s studies use combinations of qualitative and quantitative methods to explore how humans use onomastic resources to create, negotiate, perceive, and act on different kinds of identities (at micro‐, meso‐  and macrolevel). Her doctoral thesis (2011) focused on contemporary Swedish parents’ choice of first names from a socio‐economic perspective. Further studies have explored gender patterns in traditional Swedish first names (Aldrin, 2014) as well as invented first names (Aldrin, 2015).

Evgeny Shokhenmayer (Germany) - Assistant Secretary and Web Officer

Since 2012, Evgeny has been operating the e‐Onomastics blog on a regular basis (http://e‐onomastics.blogspot.com/), aiming to increase public and scholarly awareness of onomastics. In addition to that, he is a deputy editor of Onoma. His principal research interests concern name‐based text analysis, semantics of proprial units, space‐based name analysis (surname mapping), social network onomastics and applied onomastics. Evgeny’s PhD examined the associative fields of proper nouns and mechanisms of textual comprehension developed upon them (Champs associatifs des noms propres et mécanismes de la compréhension textuelle, 2009). Besides that, he carried out the following works: Analyse textuelle des noms propres et des unités propriales modifies (Südwestdeutscher Verlag für Hochschulschriften GmbH & Co., 2011), Les connotations du nom propre sous l’aspect diachronique, ou si Nicolas Chauvin était Chauviniste (Nouvelle Revue d’Onomastique, 2012). 


Lasse Hämäläinen (Finland) - Postgraduate Representative (Non-Executive)

He is a postgraduate student at the University of Helsinki. His forthcoming PhD thesis examines names in online environment, including website user names and level names in video games. In addition to onomastics, his main academic interests are game studies and computer‐mediated communication.



Alice Crook (Scotland) - Non-Executive Officer

She has been the Postgraduate Representative on the ICOS Board since 2014, and now seeks to become a non‐executive Board member. In June 2017, she graduated with a PhD from the University of Glasgow, which she completed under the supervision of Prof. Carole Hough and Dr. Simon Taylor, and is currently an affiliate of that university. Since April 2016, Alice Crook has been serving on the committee of the Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland, and is the reviews editor (since March 2017) and one of the bibliography’s compilers (since April 2015) for the Society’s journal Nomina. Currently, she is also assisting with the preparation of the second edition of the Dictionary of American Family Names.


Artur Gałkowski (Poland) - Non-Executive Officer

Ph.D., D. Litt. is associate professor at the University of Łódź, Vice‐Dean of the Faculty of Philology for Research, Projects and International Cooperation and Relations with Professional Public. His research interests revolve around onomastic issues in the international context. He is an expert in the area of chrematonomastics. He is also interested in text linguistics, translation studies, and specialized terminologies.   He is the author of nearly a hundred scientific publications, including three monographs, and the editor or co‐editor of six volumes. His postdoctoral book concerns the analysis of proper names in contemporary culture.   Among other things he is the President of the Commission of Slavic Onomastics c/o the International Committee of Slavicists and a regular member of the Onomastic Section of the Linguistic Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Nobuhle Hlongwa (South Africa) - Non-Executive Officer

Professor is the Acting Dean and Head of the School of Arts. She has 19 years’ experience in academia. She joined the University of Durban Westville in 1998 as a Lecturer. Both her MA and PhD studies were in Onomastics. She is the former Dean of Teaching and Learning in the College of Humanities (2012‐2017). She is a member of the advisory board for the South African Journal of African Languages (SAJAL), Alternation, and Nomina Africana. She has been the editorial secretary of Nomina Africana journal. She is the reviewer for the National Research Foundation (NRF) and the reviewer for the following journals: Nomina Africana, Alternation, Language Matters, and the South African Journal of African Languages.

Alexandra Petrulevich (Sweden) - Non-Executive Officer

She is an early career researcher employed by Uppsala University, Sweden. She defended her PhD thesis in May 2016 on place‐names in historical language contact and place‐name adaptation as a process exploring theoretical as well as empirical aspects of contact onomastics. Together with Jonathan Adams, Agnieszka Backman and Simon Skovgaard Boeck, Alexandra has been involved since March 2017 in the infrastructure project The Norse perception of the world: A mapping and analysis of foreign place names in medieval Swedish and Danish texts (2017‐2020). Alexandra has developed a theoretical framework that will underpin the data processing in the project for the study of place names in medieval texts and post‐medieval copies from a philological perspective. Within her teaching career she has taught onomastics and language history at bachelor level at Uppsala University and Stockholm University, Sweden, and is currently supervising an MA thesis in onomastics and giving a course in place‐name research at MA level at Stockholm University.

Valéria Tóth (Hungary) - Non-Executive Officer

She is a professor at the Department of Hungarian Linguistics, University of Debrecen, Hungary. She is a member of the Research Group on Hungarian Language History and Toponomastics founded in 2013. She is the author of five monographs (Onomatosystematical Analyses in the Early Old Hungarian Period, 2001; Historical‐ Etymological Dictionary of the Toponyms of the Abaúj and Bars Counties in the Age of the Árpád Dynasty, 2001; Typology of Change in Settlement Names, 2008; Personal Name‐Giving and Personal Name‐Usage in the Old Hungarian Period, 2016; Settlement Name‐Giving Based on Personal Names in the Old Hungarian Period, 2017), co‐author of a monograph (History of Hungarian Toponyms, Debrecen–Hamburg, 2017), and a member of the team compiling the dictionaries of old Hungarian toponyms (Data from the History of Toponyms from the Early Hungarian Period, 1997– 2017; Dictionary of Early Hungarian Toponyms, 2005). She is one of the editors of the international onomastic journal Onomastica Uralica and the national onomastic journal Helynévtörténeti Tanulmányok [Studies on Historical Toponomastics]. At present she concentrates mainly on the database project Magyar Digitális Helynévtár [Hungarian Digital Toponym Registry].

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