Prof. Jan Blommaert † (Tilburg University, Netherlands)

Jan Blommaert was Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization at Tilburg University (The Netherlands), where he also directed the Babylon Center for Studies of the Multicultural Society. He also held appointments at Ghent University (Belgium), University of the Western Cape (South Africa) and Beijing Language and Culture University (China). His work focused on theoretical and empirical approaches to language and globalization, with a special interest for forms of old and new inequality that emerge from globalization processes. He was the (co-) author or (co-) editor of Debating Diversity (Routledge 1998), Language Ideological Debates (Mouton de Gruyter 1999), Discourse: A Critical Introduction (CUP 2005), Grassroots Literacy (Routledge 2008), The Sociolinguistics of Globalization (CUP 2010) and Ethnographic Fieldwork: A Beginner's Guide (Multilingual Matters 2010). He served on the editorial boards of several international journals, and co-coordinated the INCOLAS Consortium. He was awarded the Margaret Metzger Award in 2010.