2025

In a special appearance the team around Cornelia Müller could win Prof. emerita and artist Dr. Lynne Cameron for a very personal and insightful talk on What still matters

After very insightful appearances as guest lecturers in our International Lecture Series hosted by the Viadrina Center for Gesture and Multimodality Studies the fruitful collaboration between Cornelia Müller’s Chair of Language Use and Multimodal Communication and Martin Luginbühl’s Chair of German Linguistics at the University of Basel continued in a two-day workshop organized by three of their doctoral students.

As final talk of the International Lecture Series in this semester, Prof. Terry Janzen, PhD (University of Manitoba, Canada) gave an eye-opening talk about how American signed language speakers situate the past in space while narrating a story, under the title „When the past is in front of you: Revisiting past spaces in American Sign Language“.

Prof. Dr. Martin Luginbühl, holding the Chair of German Linguistics at the University of Basel, delivered an insightful lecture on the medial shaping of war reporting, focusing on a comparative analysis of European TV news coverage of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Prof. Luginbühl’s research spans various fields, including medialinguistics, textlinguistics, cultural analytical linguistics, and conversation analysis.

The Department of Language and Media Studies ends the semester with a highlight: a students’ conference of three seminars that takes place from 6th to 7th February at AM03. The presented topics cover questions on media and gesture studies as well as language and embodiment.

We are delighted to announce our final week of the International Lecture Series of the VCGMS with two exciting guest lectures: First, media linguist Prof. Dr. Martin Luginbühl (University of Basel, Switzerland) gives a lecture on „Medial shaping of war reporting: A comparison of European TV news shows covering Russia's invasion of Ukraine“ (Tue, 04 February, 6.15 p.m.). Three days later, signed language linguist Prof. Terry Janzen, PhD (University of Manitoba, Canada) speaks about „When the past is in front of you: Revisiting past spaces in American Sign Language“ (Fri, 07 February, 4.15 p.m).

As part of the International Lecture Series, Sandra Debreslioska, PhD (Lund University, Sweden) delivered an inspiring talk titled "Language, gestures and discourse: Insights from studies on German and German Sign Language“, exploring the role that discourse-pragmatic principles play for the incidence of gestures.