Victoria Nyst

Victoria Nyst is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Leiden University Center for Linguistics and the African Studies Centre Leiden. She is the initiator of the Leiden HANDS!Lab. At the ASCL, she focuses on African sign languages and their deaf users from a variety of perspectives, including historical, linguistic, and educational perspectives. Dr Nyst was awarded a VICI grant in 2024 to do research into the history of sign languages of deaf people. The historical linguistics of sign languages offer a fundamentally new perspective on the history of human languages. Nyst addressed the social and linguistic histories of sign languages in Europe and West Africa, using new historical data and newly collected contemporary data. 

For more information about her VICI, read this interview.