Michael G. T. Strubell
Curriculum vitae
Born in 1949 in
He has lived in
He took an Hon. BA on Psychology & Physiology at the University of Oxford, an M.Sc. in Psychology of Education at the Institute of Education, London University, and a degree in
Psychology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where he also has the Diploma in Advanced Studies and is currently working towards his Ph.D.
He has researched in family and educational
bilingualism, and has written on language policies, language planning and
related topics.
After working for international schools for eight years, in 1980 he became the
head of the Servei
de Normalització Lingüística of the Generalitat de Catalunya
(Government of Catalonia), promoting the recovery of the use of the Catalan
language, under director Aina Moll and Miquel Reniu. In 1988 he became head of
another branch of the Direcció General de Política Lingüística, the Institut de
Sociolingüística Catalana under the
directorship of Miquel Reniu (for whom he was acting deputy director general for five months) and Lluís Jou.
He was secretary of the Consell Social de la
Llengua Catalana, and since 2005 he has been a fuill member of it; and a member of the board of directors, and later vice-chairman, of the Consorci per a la Normalització Lingüística.
Since September 1999 he lectures at the UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) in Barcelona. He was deputy director of the Estudis d'Humanitats i Filologia, and from April 2001 to September 2004 he was the director of the Humanities degree programme. He was a member of the drafting committee of the White paper on the Humanities degree, a project undertaken with a grant from ANECA, the Universities quality agency in Spain. He is now a lecturer in the Department of Languages and Cultures, and executive Secretary of the Linguamón-UOC Chair in Multilingualism, directed by Isidor Marí.
He is the author of the following books: Llengua i població a Catalunya (1981), La llengua
catalana a l'àrea barcelonina (with J. M. Romaní, 1986), The Catalan Language: Progress towards
normalisation (with Jude Webber, 1991); Estudis i propostes per a l'extensió
de l'ús social de la llengua catalana (coordinator, 1991); Euromosaic. Production and reproduction of minority language groups in the EU (coordinator and co-author, 1996); and Discussion manual on lesser-used languages (with Jordi Bañeres, 1998). Moreover in 1984 he co-edited (with Maria Ros) a special issue (vol. 47) of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language on
"Catalan Sociolinguistics", and was co-editor with Henri Boyer of a
special issue on “La politique linguistique de la Catalogne autonome et la
sociolinguistique catalane: un état des lieux”, of the Occitan journal Lengas, Revue de Sociolinguistique, no. 35, in 1994.
He has coordinated two reports for the European Parliament: firstly, one on the
linguistic minorities in six of the enlargement countries, was published as Lesser-used languages in States applying for EU membership (
He has also written chapters and articles in a considerable number of books. (List of publications).
On several occasions he has been a consultant for the
Council of Europe and the Organisation
for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has
given him the chance to visit
He has coordinated a number of European research projects, among which it is
worth mentioning the Euromosaic report
(1993-1995), the Atlantis observatory (2001-2002), the ADUM project (2004-2008) and the DROFoLTA study (2005-2006) on obstacles to the mobility of foreign language etachers across Europe. He was a co-author of another report for the European Commission: Report on the diversity of language teaching offered in the European Union (DiTLang, published in 2007).
He is a member of the editorial boards of Language Policy (2005-2009) and the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development.
He is director of activities of the Fundació Congrés de Cultura Catalana, and (2009-) coordinator of the Observatori de la Llengua Catalana.
He chaired Catalunya 2003, a political association calling for greater self-government for Catalonia and founded by Pere Esteve, from it inception and until it decided to disband (November 2002 - June 2005).
Since 2007 he has been a member of the board of another platform, Sobirania i Progrés, which vindicates the democratic path towards the freedom of the Catalan people.
He is married, has two sons and a daughter, and his main hobbies are mushroom
hunting, listening to classical music and riding his mountain bike (especially
downhill...).
Email: m_strubell [at] yahoo.com
Universitat
Oberta de Catalunya
Lecturer, Department of Languages and Cultures
Av. Tibidabo, 39, planta -2
E-08035 Barcelona
Catalonia
Tel. (+34) 932542116; Fax (+34) 934176495
Email: mstrubell [at] uoc.edu
http://www.uoc.edu/humfil/