Expertise

lexicography, philology, history of Frisian feeling of identity, language policy and language movement

Projects

Scientific Biography of Tony Feitsma (completed)

Online Dutch-Frisian Dictionary

Biografy

Liuwe H. Westra (Sneek, 1966) read Classics and Theology at the University of Groningen. He defended his PhD-thesis, a form history of the Apostles’ Creed, at the Catholic Theological University of Utrecht in 2002. After a few years as a full-time Protestant Church minister, in 2008 he became a postdoc researcher in Utrecht, where he studied creeds as a textual genre and was one of the editors of the online encyclopaedia Patropedia. For a number of years after that, he worked as a New Testament assistant professor in Groningen. In 2019 he was commissioned to write the scientific biography of Tony Feitsma, and as of 2022 he has been working as a lexicographer for the Online Dutch-Frisian Dictionary of the Frisian Academy.

Since his student years, he has been working in the field of linguistics and language policy, literature and culture in Frisia. Aside from his philological work, he is also an essay writer and translator. He translated The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien into Frisian (2010, 2015, 2023), and also published a new translation of the original Greek of the Gospel of Matthew (2018). Since 2020, he has been the New Testament editor for the Frisian Bible Translation Foundation. Next to that, he has been a member of the editorial board of the critical edition of Desiderius Erasmus’s Opera Omnia since 2022, a project of the Huygens Institute in Amsterdam. Since 2023 he is a board member of the Stichting Nassau en Friesland.