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:
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
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).
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.
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
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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