People

research staff:

research associates:

steering committee:

 


 

geert Geert Jacobs received a PhD in Linguistics in 1997 from the University of Antwerp, where he wrote a dissertation on the metapragmatics of press releases. He teaches English business communication at the Department of Linguistics at Ghent University. His research focuses on the study of professional and institutional discourse in a pragmatic perspective, with special interest in news production processes. Geert has published research articles in the Journal of Pragmatics, Text, Text & Talk, Public Relations Review, Pragmatics, Document Design and the Journal of Sociolinguistics. In addition, he has co-edited volumes on the Pragmatics of Crisis (with L. Van Waes, 2002), Language, Communication and the Economy (with G. Erreygers; John Benjamins, 2005), Discourse in Organizations (with C. Braecke, K. Pelsmaekers and T. Van Hout, 2006), the Discourse of News Management (with H. Pander Maat, 2008) and Linguistic Ethnography and Institutions (with E. Van Praet and P. Flynn).

 

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Ellen Van Praet Ellen Van Praet is assistant professor at University College Ghent and post-doctoral researcher at Ghent University. She teaches English Business Communication, Organizational Communication and Intercultural Communication to master students of Multilingual Business Communication. She has published several articles in the field of linguistic ethnography, business meetings, media discourse, power, negotiation and decision-making strategies. She has worked as an assistant editor for Lannoo Publishing (Tielt, Belgium). She has edited a special issue on Linguistic Ethnography and institutions and is currently co-editor of a special issue on discursive perspectives on news production for Journal of Pragmatics. Her research interests include organisational/institutional discourse, business communication, media language and linguistic ethnography. Correspondence address: University of Ghent, Department of Language and Communication, Blandijnberg 2, B-9000 Gent, Belgium or University College Ghent, Groot-Brittanniëlaan 45 , B-9000 Gent, Belgium .

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Tom Van Houtis assistant professor in the Journalism and New Media Department at Leiden University and visiting lecturer in the Department of Management at the University of Antwerp.  He holds a PhD in linguistics from Ghent University and specializes in qualitative approaches to discourse, journalism and media studies. He is a member of the coordinating committee of the Linguistic Ethnography Forum and the AILA research network in media linguistics. Recent work was published in the Journal of Pragmatics and Text & Talk

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Astrid Vandendaele graduated as a Master of Germanic Languages (English/Dutch) at Ghent University (2005). Currently, she is assistant lecturer at the Department of Language and Communication at the University of Ghent , where she teaches Economic English to undergraduate students and Business Communication in the advanced master’s programme of Multilingual Business Communication. In November 2010 she joined the HOF project “Flanders in the news: a discursive analysis of the news production process” (Ghent University College) as a research fellow; she focussed on the ethnographic research, which mainly involved interviewing EU correspondents and charting their daily practices. At present, she is preparing a doctoral dissertation on the role newspaper sub-editors play in the newsroom:  how exactly do they influence the news production process? Which power do they have over the construction of the final product? What is communication like between them, the journalists, the editors-in-chief and the graphic designers in charge of layout? She has been working as a part-time sub-editor herself for Flemish broadsheet De Morgen since October 2007.

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 Jasper Vandenberghe graduated from University College Ghent’s Master in Translation Studies in 2006. He also obtained a postgraduate degree in Translation from the Instituto Politécnico de Leiria (Portugal 2007) and earned a master’s degree in Estudios Ibéricos e Iberoamericanos from KU Leuven (2008). He is currently preparing a discourse analytic doctoral dissertation on representation in newspaper and corporate discourse on Spanish Foreign Investment in the Latin-American region.

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Bram Vertommen is a research fellow on the HOF project Flanders in the news: a discursive analysis of the news production process (Ghent University College). He graduated as a Master of Linguistics (specialization: Sociolinguistics/Pragmatics) (Antwerp, 2008) and as a Master of Advanced Studies in Linguistics (specialization: Cognitive and Functional Linguistics) (Leuven, 2010).  His research interests include (systemic functional and pragmatic) text and discourse analytical studies of (both oral and written) language use.  He is particularly interested in the indexical functions of specific linguistic devices related to multilingual settings, such as code-switching.

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Els Tobback is a post-doctoral researcher at the French department of Ghent University. She teaches French linguistics (French syntax) and Business French. Her PhD thesis, completed in 2005, investigated the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of French object complementconstructions. Her recent research interests include the further study of non verbal predications and the study of news production processes from a linguistic ethnographic perspective.

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  Lutgard Lams is a lecturer at the Sinology Department of the Catholic University of Louvain (KUL) and the Department of Languages and Literature of the University College Brussels (HUB). She studied Germanic Philology at the KUL, received a M.A. in Literary Theory at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU, Pittsburgh), and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Antwerp (UA). Her areas of scholarly interest include discourse analysis, the pragmatics of language and ideology in media discourse, news production processes, political communication, and language and politics in China. She has published various articles on identity politics and nationalism in China/Taiwan/Hong Kong, Chinese official discourse, and cross-Strait relations as represented in Chinese/Taiwanese media discourses.

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felicitas Felicitas Macgilchrist iProfessor of Media Research at the University of Göttingen and head of the "Textbooks as Media" department at the Georg Eckert Institute in Braunschweig, Germany. She has studied psychology, education and applied linguistics, held visiting scholarships at New York University and the University of Birmingham, and been a lecturer at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. She is principal investigator of the SAW funded project: "Memory Practices: Enacting and Contesting the Curriculum in Contemporary Practices". Her research focuses on the cultural politics of education and media. Further research interests include memory practices, ethnographic discourse analysis and post-foundational theories.

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Reza Kheirabadi is a PhD candidate in Tarbiyat Modares University (TMU) (Islamic Republic of Iran). He got his M.A in general linguistics from TMU in 2008. His main fields of activities are news linguistics, pragmatics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). His M.A Thesis was titled  “the linguistic study of news values in press of Iran” and now he is working on his PhD dissertation titled as “the linguistic model of news production and news selection: CDA approach”. He has also been active in teaching Persian (Farsi) language to non-Persian speakers for some years. Now he is in  university of Gent for a six months research scholarship.

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henk Henk Pander Maat is an Associate Professor at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS at Utrecht University in The Netherlands. His research interests include the analysis of coherence relations, genre analysis and readability research. More information about his publications can be found on his website.

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Daniel Perrin is professor of media linguistics and Director of the Institute of Applied Media Studies (IAM) at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. He also serves as the Secretary General of the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) and as Associated Editor of the International Journal of Applied Linguistics (InJAL). Main areas of research and teaching: media linguistics, text linguistics, methodology of applied linguistics, text production research and professional communication.

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Colleen Cotter is a senior lecturer in Linguistics at Queen Mary, University of London. After a first career in daily newspaper journalism in Northern California, she got a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley (examining the role of radio in language revitalization in Ireland). Her primary research areas include news media language, endangered languages, and the ethnographic, social, discursive, and interactional dimensions of communication and community. Colleen has published in the Journal of Historical Pragmatics, English Today, and the International Journal of the Sociology of Language as well as edited volumes. Her book, News Talk: Investigating the Language of Journalism (Cambridge, 2010) examines news language from the perspective of the practitioner, looking at how the process of newsgathering and daily journalistic routines work together to produce the language unique to daily news.

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Maria Cristina Gatti holds a PhD in English Studies and Linguistics with a dissertation on spatiotemporal and cognitive-semiotic integrated approaches to discourse. She has been teaching at  the University of Verona and the University of Milano-Bicocca as an assistant professor in English Linguistics, Discourse Analysis and English for Specialized Purposes at graduate and post-graduate levels. Her research interests are in the fields of Discourse Analysis, Cognitive Linguistics, Multimodality and discourse for the web, Corporate discourse, Spatiotemporality. In the specific, she has published in international journals and edited volumes on temporality in intercultural business discourse, corporate discourse for the web, spatiotemporality for persuasive discourse, multilingualism, linguistic diversity and language policies of the EU. She was a visiting scholar at the University of California-Berkeley. Her current research focus is on cognitive-semiotic approaches to temporality and spatiality in web-mediated discourse, business identity discourse, and metaphorical scenarios in political discourse.

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Jen Cope has been an academic tutor on the M.Ed TESOL program at the University of Sydney since 2009, and has taught General English and English for Specific Purposes at TAFE NSW (a major Australian vocational college) for over 15 years. Prior to teaching, Jen was a Publisher in both London and Sydney, specialising in the financial, legal and business fields.  Based in Sydney, Jen is currently preparing a discourse analytic doctoral dissertation on newspaper commentaries from the USA, the UK and Australia during the Global Financial Crisis. She is examining how influential writers position themselves and their audiences through their language use, and the impact of cultural context on the discourse. Jen has published papers in the University of Sydney Papers in TESOL and The Asian Conference on Language Learning 2013, Japan, in addition to presenting a number of papers on her PhD research project at international conferences in the USA, Australia, Macau and London.

Jana Declercq  Jana Declercq graduated from the University of Antwerp in 2014 and has a master’s degree in Linguistics. For her master thesis, she examined the pragmatics of sibling interaction, focusing on the use of social control acts and metapragmatic and metalinguistic discourse. Jana is currently preparing a PhD under the supervision of Professor Geert Jacobs. She aims at analyzing the lifecycle of news stories on elderly-related health issues. In particular, taking a case-oriented, multi-sited linguistic ethnographic perspective, she sets out to investigate the complex discursive practices and professional routines that determine the dissemination and uptake of specific pieces of information on diseases, cures and health enhancement.

steering committee:

Name Affiliation Email
Colleen Cotter Queen Mary University London c.m.cotter AT qmul.ac.uk
Simon Cottle Cardiff University cottles AT cardiff.ac.uk
Giuliana Garzone University of Milan giuliana.garzone AT unimi.it
Geert Jacobs Ghent University geert.jacobs AT ugent.be
Frederik Marain online media consultant frederik AT marain.be
Daniel Perrin Zurich University of Applied Sciences daniel.perrin AT zhaw.ch
Mark Peterson Miami University petersm2 AT muohio.edu
Jan Reyns financial journalist, De Standaard jan.reyns AT pandora.be
Andrea Rocci University of Lugano roccia AT lu.unisi.ch
Stef Slembrouck Ghent University stef.slembrouck AT ugent.be
Tom Van Hout Ghent University tom.vanhout AT ugent.be
Ellen Van Praet Ghent University ellen.vanpraet AT ugent.be
Jef Verschueren University of Antwerp jef.verschueren AT ua.ac.be

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