Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei trained in classical composition, linguistics, multimedia art, and philosophy, receiving his Ph.D. in Media & Communications from the European Graduate School and Ph.D. in Modern Thought from the University of Aberdeen. He works as a publisher and philologist, pursuing studies in Myōan shakuhachi and group-analytic psychotherapy at the Institute of Group Analysis.
Van Gerven Oei is director of scholar- and queer-led open-access press punctum books, director of open metadata management and dissemination platform Thoth, board member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association, founder of the Union for Nubian Studies, and editorial board member of Stedelijk Studies Journal.
He is a specialist in Old Nubian philology, publishing the standard work A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian (Peeters, 2021). Further publications include a collection of essays on a decade of art and politics in Albania, Rënia e së ardhmes: Arti, korrupsioni dhe fundi i tranzicionit shqiptar (Pika pa sipërfaqe, 2023); translations of Japanese manga artist Gengoroh Tagame collected in The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame Volume 2 (Fantagraphics, 2022); and Lapidari (punctum books, 2015), the first complete overview of socialist monumentality in Albania. Van Gerven Oei’s scholarly research has appeared in Afterall, Glossa, The Journal of Juristic Papyrology, postmedieval, and Theory & Event, among other venues.