Dr. Anton Lustig

Anton LustigAnton Lustig, born in 1964, studied Sinology and Comparative Linguistics at the University of Leiden. His centre of research was at the village of Loilung (or Léinóng in Chinese) in Ruìlì county in the Chinese province of Yúnnán. He first travelled to the Zaiwa language community in 1992, whilst still a student conducting research for his undergraduate thesis, and he has been visiting the Zaiwa villages annually ever since.

Lustig visited Loilung on three spearate three trips whilst still an undergraduate student, whereby the third of these early trips was financed by a travel grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). After his third trip, he became a research fellow at the Himalayan Languages Project in Leiden. During his two-year fellowship, from April 1997 until April 1999, he worked on his dissertation on the grammar of Zaiwa, which he defended in 2002. A commercial edition of his Zaiwa grammar is slated for publication at Brill in Leiden. The hefty Zaiwa grammar will appear in two volumes, comprising both a grammar and a dictionary.

After his dissertation, Anton Lustig immigrated to China and became professor of Dutch at the Beijing Foreign Studies University at Peking. In the summer of 2009, he will leave his position at the Beijing Foreign Studies University and move to a Zaiwa village, where he will combine language education with arts. He will develop a writing system for three yet unwritten languages related to Zaiwa that are spoken in and around his newly adopted village of residence. Lustig is also a gifted painter and music composer and devotes much of his time to the arts.

Selected publications

Lustig, Anton. [forthcoming]. Grammar of Zaiwa. Leiden: Brill.

Lustig, Anton. [forthcoming]. Zaiwa Dictionary. Leiden: Brill.

Lustig, Anton. Zaiwa Grammar. Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden: doctoral dissertation, 25 September 2002.