Isaac Mwinlaaru

Isaac N. Mwinlaaru is Iso Lomso Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English of the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. He is an exchange resident fellow at the ASCL with funding from STIAS. He obtained his PhD in 2017 from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is also a Fellow of the African Humanities Program of the American Council of Learned Societies. His primary research interest areas include systemic functional linguistics, descriptive linguistics, language typology, historical linguistics, critical discourse studies and educational linguistics, with a focus on Africa. His expertise is in West African languages. His publications in these areas appear in a wide range of journals, notably Research in African Literatures, Language Sciences, Lingua, Corpora, Critical Discourse Studies, Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, Journal of World Languages, Functions of Language, Power & Education, Sociolinguistic Studies, and WORD. His co-authored book Systemic Functional Insights on Language and Linguistics (Springer, 2022) was shortlisted for the M.A.K. Halliday Prize 2023. He has also co-edited a collected volume, Approaches to Specialised Genres (Routledge, 2021). He is also a contributor to The Routledge Handbook of African Linguistics (2018). He has presented papers at many conferences around the world, in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. He has been a plenary speaker at conferences in Brazil, China and Tunisia.

During his residency period at the ASCL, he will be working on contemporary discourses of resistance and decoloniality in Africa, focusing on pro-coup discourses in the Sahel region of West Africa.