Jan ten Thije appointed professor of Intercultural Communication
Dr Jan D. ten Thije has been appointed professor of Intercultural Communication at the Faculty of Humanities as from 1 October. The chair has been placed under the Languages, Literature and Communication (TLC) department, with the aim of connecting research at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics (UiL OTS) with research at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON).
Ten Thije studied Dutch Language and Culture and Linguistics at the ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ of Amsterdam (UvA). He obtained his PhD from Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ (doctoral supervisors: Herrlitz and Ehlich) and held a position as visiting professor at the ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ of Vienna.
Ten Thije’s research encompasses various approaches within the broad research field of Intercultural Communication.
In their doctoral thesis (1994), Koole and Ten Thije analysed successful intercultural team meetings between Turkish, Moroccan and Dutch education advisers, as well as between Surinamese and Dutch advisers.
RECEPTIVE MULTILINGUALISM
Ten Thije worked at the Chemnitz ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ of Technology for six years, where he conducted research on identity construction in ‘Trabi-Geschichten’ (Trabi stories) based on biographical interviews about this famous car from German Democratic Republic (GDR) . After his return to Utrecht in 2002, he supervised research on (also known as ) within the European Commission and elsewhere. On behalf of the Dutch Language Union, he is currently coordinating research on the practices of receptive multilingualism / lingua receptiva in the construction, healthcare and education sectors in the Netherlands and Flanders.
Intercultural Communication
With Ten Thije as coordinator, the Master’s in Intercultural Communication has grown into one of the Faculty’s successful Master’s programmes with a substantial intake of international students. For the past 12 years, Ten Thije has participated in a European Consortium of nine universities that offer a joint programme in Intercultural Communication (called Eurocampus). As a teaching fellow, he was involved in educational innovation in higher education as part of the International Classroom. He spent the last two years coordinating the USO project , in which intercultural training courses were developed for lecturers and staff.
Language education and policy
Ten Thije is editor of the published by Gruyter Mouton and series editor of the journal published by Brill Publications in Leiden.
His areas of interest include institutional and intercultural communication in linguistically and culturally diverse organisations, (receptive) multilingualism, intercultural training, language education, language policy and functional pragmatics.
Ten Thije will present his inaugural lecture on Friday, January 31, 2020.