Abbas Benmamoun is the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement, a new position responsible for providing intellectual leadership, guidance and oversight of university-wide strategies and programs to enhance faculty excellence. He oversees faculty development programs, including programs to recruit outstanding and diverse faculty, and partner with schools, departments, and centers to enhance faculty success at Duke and promote a climate that values and celebrates inclusive excellence.
Prior to joining Duke, Dr. Benmamoun served as Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Academic Policies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He additionally served in different leadership roles at the University of Illinois, including as acting director of the Center of Middle Eastern and Asian Studies, head of the Department of Linguistics, director of the School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics, and Associate Provost for Faculty Development. A native of Morocco, Benmamoun earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from the Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco, his master’s degree from University College London, and his PhD from the University of Southern California. He has served on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Benmamoun’s research focuses on the comparative syntax and morphology of natural language and on heritage languages, particularly on issues of language maintenance and loss within immigrant communities. He is the author of The Feature Structure of Functional Categories (Oxford University Press, 2000), co-author of The Syntax of Arabic (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Arabic Linguistics (Routledge, 2018).