Book Information
Practical Phonetics and Phonology 2e
About the Authors
Beverley Collins was educated at Cardiff University and University College London, and later received his doctorate from the Phonetics Institute of Utrecht University. He began his university career at Lancaster where he set up the phonetics section of what is now the Linguistics Department. For many years, he has been based in the Netherlands and until 2003 taught phonetics and the pronunciation of English at Leiden University; he is now an associate member of the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. He has also had experience of academic work in several other countries including Togo, Spain and, more recently, Belgium where for two years he was Visiting Professor at Ghent University. His research interests take in British accent varieties, contrastive phonetics and the history of phonetics.
Inger M. Mees, who grew up speaking Danish, Dutch and English, was educated at Leiden University and the University of Edinburgh, obtaining her doctorate from Leiden. At present she holds the post of Associate Professor in the English department of the Copenhagen Business School, where she teaches English pronunciation, phonetics of English and sociolinguistics. Her research interests include contrastive phonetics, sociolinguistics, the history of phonetics, and translation processes.
Beverley Collins and Inger Mees have co-authored several books and many articles dealing with phonetics, accents of British English and pronunciation teaching. They co-operated on the full-scale biography of the English phonetician Daniel Jones, entitled The Real Professor Higgins (Mouton de Gruyter, 1999). Most recently, in addition to Practical Phonetics and Phonology, they have edited two historiographical collections, the eight-volume edition of Daniel Jones's Selected Works (Routledge, 2003) and the seven-volume collection Phonetics of English in the Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 2006).
They can be contacted at: b.s.collins@let.leidenuniv.nl and im.isv@cbs.dk.