Research

The Department of English and American Studies encompasses not only the study of language, linguistics, literature and culture of Great Britain and the USA, but also other regions such as Australia, the Caribbean and Ireland. Accordingly, the individual research areas are not considered in isolation but are networked with each other and researched and taught within a scientific-theoretical framework that includes English language teaching (ELT). In the Department of English and American Studies, the four sub-disciplines of literary/cultural studies, linguistics, language proficiency and ELT work closely together and complement each other in contemporary and practice-oriented research and teaching.

Research Areas

Gender Studies and Identity Research

  • Gender Studies
  • Gender and Feminist Theory
  • LGBTQIA+ and Masculinity Studies

Literary and Cultural Studies

  • African American Literature
  • American Literature and Culture from the Early Colonial Era to the 21st Century
  • Autobiographical Writing / (Auto-)Biography Research
  • Comics and Picture Book Research
  • Crime Literature
  • Historical Fiction
  • Nostalgia Research
  • Preface and Paratext Research
  • Science and Literature
  • Scottish Literature
  • The American Nineteenth Century in Literature and Culture
  • Transnational and Comparative American Studies (Transatlantic, Caribbean, Turkey)

Media and Popular Culture

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)
  • Multimodal Discourse in Advertising
  • Multimodality and Inter-semiotics in Hypertexts (Language Teaching Software and Tourism Websites)
  • News texts (Text Types, Ideologies, Manipulation)
  • Popular Culture, Genre Studies (Film, Television, Musical, Melodrama, Comedy)

English Language Teaching and Second Language Acquisition

  • Acquisition of Language Variation and Development of Sociolinguistic Competence
  • Articulatory Phonetics in Second Language Acquisition
  • Developmental Speech and Language Disorders in the EFL Classroom
  • English Language, Literature, and Culture Teaching
  • Language Teaching and Learning Research
  • Reading in Second Language Acquisition (Eye Tracking)
  • Second Language Acquisition Theories

Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis and Text Theory

  • Methods in Discourse Analysis
  • Pragmatics
  • Text Linguistics
  • Text Theory and Text Constitution

Sociolinguistics and Language Variation

  • Acquisition and Cognitive Aspects of Language Variation
  • Intercultural Communication
  • Language Attitudes, Perception and Discrimination
  • Language Standardisation in Contemporary English and its History
  • Sociolinguistics and Language Variation in Great Britain, Ireland, the USA and Australia