Anne Maria Fehn
Research Assistant
I am a linguist with a special interest in the history of southern Africa. While my main field of expertise lies with documentary linguistics and historical linguistics, I also take an avid interest in multidisciplinary approaches to population history research, including methodologies from human genetics and bioinformatics.
I hold a PhD in African Studies from the University of Cologne which I received for my work on the endangered Khoe-Kwadi language Ts’ixa. Within the frame of my doctoral and postdoctoral research, fieldwork has taken me to Botswana, Namibia, Angola and Zimbabwe, where I had the opportunity to study multiple languages of the Khoe-Kwadi, Kx’a and Bantu families.
I have been a member of CIBIO-InBIO’s "HumanEVOL - Human Evolutionary Genetics” group since 2014 and have contributed to multidisciplinary research projects focusing on the population history of southwestern Angola and the Okavango River Basin. Since 2021, I am the leader of the research group "LangPOP – Language in Population History” which is a sister group to HumanEVOL striving to integrate linguistic and genetic data in population history research.
Since 2019, I hold an FCT Junior Researcher contract in the frame of which I am expanding my knowledge on quantitative methodologies in the cultural sciences. At present, I am working on various aspects of the Khoe-Kwadi and southwestern Bantu languages, including phonology, tense-aspect morphology, subclassification and the role of language contact.