I am a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer ("Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin"). In my doctoral dissertation titled "The Role of (Deliberate) Metaphor in Communicating Knowledge in Academic Discourse", I analyze 23 academic lectures from four different disciplines (biology, chemistry, philosophy, and psychology) that I videotaped at a US-American college. The qualitative analysis of the role of metaphor in knowledge communication in this relatively large corpus (for a manual metaphor analysis) focuses on the recent concept of deliberate metaphor (Steen 2008, 2010, 2015, 2017), but is still rooted in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson 1980). By combining cognitive and discourse aspects of metaphor in its actual use, my thesis contributes to both Cognitive Linguistics and Applied Linguistics.

Conceptual Metaphor Theory (combined with discourse analytical approaches to language use and cognition), applied to various discourse areas, constitutes one of my primary research interests. Before I began working on my PhD project, I investigated emotion metaphors in expert-lay-communication (link). Psychological and linguistic aspects of emotions are also among my general research interests.

Travel Grant to attend and present at the 2013 Metaphor Festival in Stockholm, Sweden, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), August 2013.

Travel Grant to attend and present at the Corpus Linguistics 2011 conference, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), July 2011.

University Stipend for Ph.D students, Flensburg University, 07/2010 - 04/2012.