As head of department, she is responsible for financial management and strategic staff development within the department. She also deals with substantive choices in the field of teaching and research. She also holds two chairs: Applied Linguistics and Romance Languages.
As a professor, she focuses on both theoretical and applied linguistic research. Her theoretical work zooms in on subtle grammatical differences between languages, while her applied research is at the intersection of language, hearing and cognition. A particular interest is in the acquisition of Romanian as a mother tongue and as a foreign language. She conducts this research in close collaboration with Prof Larisa Avram of the University of Bucharest, where she has held the title of Professor Honoris Causa since 2015.
Career
After completing her studies, she immediately started working as a lecturer-researcher at Ghent University. After obtaining her PhD thesis, she was given a postdoctoral research position (FWO mandate) at the University of Antwerp. Subsequently, she was an associate professor of Romanian Linguistics at INALCO in Paris for several years. In 2005, a NWO VIDI project brought her to Leiden University, where she was able to further develop her research on language and hearing disorders.
Career at VU Amsterdam
In 2010, she was appointed professor of Applied Linguistics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she has since enjoyed working in both research, teaching and administrative roles. In 2012, she first became department head of the then Department of Language and Communication. Two years later, in 2014, she founded the Language and Hearing Centre Amsterdam together with Dr Theo Goverts, then head of audiology at the VUmc. This interdisciplinary partnership brings together the expertise available in language and hearing within the VU campus. In 2018, she was also entrusted with the Chair of Romance Languages.
Besides her research and teaching, she has chaired the Humanities Ethics Review Committee for many years and has served on various working groups and committees at departmental, faculty and institutional level. Recently, together with her colleagues in the Applied Linguistics Chair, she founded the Centre for Language and Development, which puts scientific knowledge about language and language development at the service of education and healthcare professionals.
Study
Martine Coene studied Romance language and literature at the universities of Antwerp, Valladolid and Bucharest with a focus on French, Spanish and Romanian. After her PhD, she continued to study the language development of young children with congenital deafness or hearing impairment. She also took further courses in Data Analysis and Statistical Science and in Applied Artificial Intelligence.
What do you hope to contribute to the new faculty?
'Language is at the heart of human interaction, knowledge transfer and cultural expression. With our linguistic focus, the department Language, Literature, and Communication is complementary to the research and teaching within other disciplines in the new faculty. I hope it will give our young researchers room to develop further and continue to train our students to become critical thinkers. By applying scientific insights from language, literature and communication, they can contribute to understanding and addressing societal challenges.'
