Johan P. Snapper
Em. Queen Beatrix Professor in Dutch Studies (snapper@berkeley.edu)
Professor Snapper did his Graduate work in Germanic languages and literatures at the University of Chicago (M.A.) and the University of California at Los Angeles (Ph.D.). He specializes in eighteenth-century German literature and modern Netherlandic literature. In addition to his doctoral dissertation (on Friedrich Maximilian Klinger) his publications include six books and more than fifty scholarly articles. One of his monographs deals with the work of the controversial Dutch writer Gerard Reve, while his most recent study (The Ways of Marga Minco) is a book on the Dutch writer Marga Minco, best known for her novels and short stories on the Jewish persecution in the Netherlands. Professor Snapper is on the Editorial Board of a number of publications, including the Publications of the American Association for Netherlandic Studies (PAANS), the Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies (CJNS) and De Nederlandse Taal. Among national and international offices he has held are the presidency of the American Association for Netherlandic Studies, membership on the executive board of the International Association for Netherlandics (IVN), and the chair of the Netherlands International Commission on Higher Education for Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Rumania. He is also the organizer of eight international conferences on Dutch linguistics and literature and the founder of the Netherlands-America University League. For his scholarly and community service, Professor Snapper received a Congressional Citation of Merit (USA), and he has been knighted as Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau (the Netherlands) and Officer in the Order of the Crown (Belgium). He also serves as the honorary consul of the Netherlands for northern California. Professor Snapper was presented with a Festschrift, Vantage Points, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Queen Beatrix Chair.
Thomas F. Shannon
Em. Professor of Germanic Linguistics and Dutch Studies (tshannon@berkeley.edu)
Thomas F. Shannon, Professor of Germanic Linguistics, member of the Dutch Studies Program faculty, and former director of the UC exchange program in Germany, has been in our department since 1980. He holds Master’s degrees in German (SUNY Albany) and Theoretical Linguistics (Indiana) and a Ph.D. in Germanic Linguistics (Indiana).
Shannon has taught and conducted research in the Netherlands at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen on a Fulbright grant and researched at the Institut für deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. Active professionally, he serves on MLA Executive Committees, the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Germanic Linguistics, the Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis, and the Dutch journal Nederlandse Taalkunde (Dutch Linguistics), and was formerly Vice President of the Society for Germanic Philology.
His areas of specialization are modern German and Dutch, particularly syntax and phonology, and he has published widely on a variety of topics, including naturalness, syllable structure, complementation and control, ergative phenomena, passivization, perfect auxiliary selection, and word order. He is particularly interested in functional and cognitive approaches, e.g. the affects of various semantic, pragmatic, and processing factors on syntactic phenomena. Working from actual texts, he is presently studying several word order phenomena in Dutch and German, especially the ordering of elements in the middle field as well as historical change in West Germanic, including Afrikaans, Low German, and Yiddish.
Professor Shannon is a faculty member of and Graduate Advisor for the Germanic Linguistics Specialization composed of six upper division and thirteen graduate level courses. As such the Specialization imbues the Humanities with a scientific component; thus priority to the carefully rotated linguistics courses is given for achieving the essential competence in Germanic Linguistics.