Linguistics

His research considers the dynamics of language contact and change in Northern Australia, and he has extensive experience working with several new contact languages spoken in this region, especially varieties of Northern Australian Kriol. He is particularly interested in the semantics and pragmatics of contact varieties, and what close examination of these domains can reveal about the factors which contribute to how semantic and pragmatic categories are transferred (or not) from source languages.

Connor is also interested in the sociolinguistics of contact languages in Australia. This includes the historical linguistic ecologies which triggered the emergence of these languages, linguistic variation in contemporary language use, and how these languages are socially positioned through linguistic ideologies. Given the low recognition of these languages among government and service providers, much of his work also considers strategies to support the recognition and legitimisation of these varieties. He has worked with several communities in the East Kimberley region to develop an orthography for their varieties of Kriol and is actively supporting its implementation in a range of settings.

During her PhD, Dr. Dumrukcic also studied at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge. She previously worked at the Oxford Language and Brain Lab where she designed, conducted, and analyzed behavioural and eye-tracking experiments. Since 2019, she has been working at the University of Cologne, particularly on projects dealing with (multimodal) corpus compilation led by Prof. Beatrix Busse. Her research interests include bi/multilingualism, morphology, phonology, lexicology, and language processing using psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic, and corpus linguistic methods.

She is the author of Digital Media and Refugeehood in Contemporary Australia:  Resistance and Counter-Discourses from Detention (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), which was recently awarded the PhD Excellence Grant by the European Association for Studies of Australia (EASA). The book focuses on the resistance practices digitally enacted by a group of refugees in the context of the Australian detention policy. Drawing on critical-, multimodal- and ethnographic-discursive analytical research, the study brings to the fore the digitally mediated lived experiences of detained refugees as articulated from Australia-run offshore and onshore detention facilities.

Her recent publications also comprise “Refugee linguascapes: The role of English in Australia-run detention contexts”, “On Documentation, Language and Social Media” in Freedom, Only Freedom. The Prison Writings of Behrouz Boochani (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), and “Populist Islamophobia: The Australian Refugee Crisis on Twitter”.

Together with Professor Katherine Elizabeth Russo, she has guest-edited Australia as a Risk Society: Hopes and Fears of the Past, the Present and the Future, a Special Issue of the Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia (JEASA). She has participated in several international conferences organized by the European Association for Studies of Australia (EASA) and visited the Centre for Australian Studies in December 2023, where she presented her recently published book.

She established the Sydney Knowledge and Language Translation Lab which hosts a dozen research students working on environmental, health, literary translations. Dr Ji has published over 70 research papers/book chapters and is the author/editor of two dozen books (with Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Routledge, Palgrave, Springer, John Benjamins, Waseda University Press, University of Montréal Press, Canada), the editor of two special journal issues published by the MIT Press (Leonardo), USA and University of Montreal Press in Canada (Meta: Journal des traducteurs). Dr Ji is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Translation and Social Practices (2020), New York: Oxford University Press (with Sara Laviosa, Italy) (2020); the editor of Advances in Empirical Translation Studies: Developing Translation Resources and Technologies, Cambridge University Press (with Michael Oakes, Wolverhampton) (2019). Her books are reviewed in International Journal of Corpus Linguistics; Journal of Specialised Translation; International Journal of Asian Studies (Cambridge University Press); The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (Oxford University Press); Australian Journal of Linguistics; Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Technology; Babel: Revue internationale de la traduction; Target: International Journal of Translation Studies; Languages in Contrast; Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Communication Science; Literary and Linguistic Computing (Oxford University Press). The 2012 book Quantitative Methods in Corpus Translation Studies (John Benjamins) has been reviewed in numerous academic journals and yearbooks of applied linguistics with leading publishers such as Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press. Dr Ji is the founding series editor of the Cambridge Studies in Language Practices and Social Development, Cambridge University Press; founding editorial board member of the book series of Cambridge Elements of Translation and Interpreting, Cambridge University Press; and the founding editor of Routledge Studies of Empirical Translation and Multilingual Communication, New York/Oxon: Routledge. Her research has been supported by the British Academy, Japanese Society for the Promotion of Sciences, Australian Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, Toshiba International Foundation, Worldwide University Networks Research Development Fund, and a number of universities in Europe, North America, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil. Dr. Ji is collaborating closely with Prof. Adone and team.

During his three years at Kintore he began studying linguistics and was also learning the local language, Pintupi. Doug then moved to Geraldton in WA, where he was Teacher/Linguist at the Yamaji Language Centre for nine years. In this role he worked with the many endangered languages of the region. While in this position Doug completed an Honours thesis consisting of a description of Wajarri. Doug then moved to Canberra where he undertook a PhD for which he wrote a descriptive grammar of Wutung (Sko family). Following this Doug joined AIATSIS (the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies) as the Research Fellow in Linguistics. Currently Doug is heading up the newly formed AIATSIS Centre for Australian Languages. Doug’s research interests include language documentation and description, grammar writing and lexicography, with a core focus on language maintenance and revitalisation. Doug has worked intensively on a number of Australian languages in WA and in recent years has been working closely with the Ngunnawal community of Canberra to assist them with their language work. Doug has worked closely with members of CAS such as Prof. Adone. 

His research focuses on Australian Indigenous languages, Contact varieties of English, Language change, variation and contact. Robert has been working in the Top End of Australia documenting the Iwaidjan languages, especially Amurdak and Iwaidja, and Aboriginal English spoken on Croker Island. Together with Mark Harvey (Newcastle), he demonstrated for the first time that almost all Australian languages form one language family (Diachronica, 2017). Robert has worked closely with members of CAS such as Prof. Adone. 

Currently a researcher in the Special Collaborative Research Centre “Media of Co-operation” at the University of Siegen, he has previously taught and held positions at the universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge, Potsdam and Sydney. He is the author of the books Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) and A History of Modern Linguistics (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), as well as editor of several volumes, including Form and Formalism in Linguistics (Language Science Press, 2019) and The Limits of Structuralism (Oxford University Press, 2023). He is the founding editor of the scholarly blog History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences (https://hiphilangsci.net/) and host of the monthly podcast of the same name. Click here for his personal homepage. Dr. McElvenny is collaborating closely with Prof. Adone and team.

As an expert of international standing in Language Studies and Linguistics, her research outputs have covered different areas of second language acquisition, pragmatics and intercultural learning as well as computer-assisted language learning. She has presented a substantial number of papers in these fields at national and international conferences and her research has been published in sole-authored and co-edited books, as well as in numerous book chapters and internationally recognized journals.

Her current work on language in the context of migration has an international and interdisciplinary approach, and includes collaboration with scholars from the research centre for ‘Intercultural Study of Literature and Media’ at the University of Hamburg.

Professor Möllering is a member of the Australian Language and Culture Network (LCNAU), and with colleagues from the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne has held a major OLT grant to establish a national language studies portal for the Australian tertiary sector. In acknowledgement of her research expertise, Professor Möllering was invited as member of the 2010, 2012 and 2015 Research Evaluation Committees for the Humanities and Creative Arts in the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative conducted by the Australian Research Council.

She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the Australian National University (Canberra, 2014), with additional background in Philosophy (PhD Université Paris-8, 2005). She has extensive experience working with speakers of Indigenous languages in communities of inland Arnhem Land, in the Top End of Australia. In line with her combined linguistic, philosophical and anthropological interests, Maïa Ponsonnet’s research concerns the role of language in humans’ lives, and in particular how language may channel or modify people’s experience and management of emotions. She is the author of a number of articles and books, in particular a 2014 monograph on the encoding of emotions in Dalabon (Arnhem Land) and a 2019 monograph on a comparison between Dalabon and Kriol, the creole that has replaced Dalabon. Some of her work is also available via the website: www.EmotionLanguageAustralia.com. Maïa has worked closely with Prof. Adone at CAS.

He is specialised in language documentation, field linguistics and endangered languages and has published grammars of Dagbani (Ghana), Urarina (Peru) before entering research on the Miriwoong language (North-western Australia). In his current role as senior linguist of MDWg he is engaged in the revitalisation of the Miriwoong language of the East Kimberley region. His academic background includes a PhD from Düsseldorf (Germany) as well as postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley and at La Trobe University (Melbourne). His expertise in endangered languages with a focus on Australia has led to teaching engagements at various German universities, including University of Cologne, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, and University of Konstanz. Knut has worked closely with members of CAS such as Prof. Adone. 

Her research in Australian Studies ranges across the fields of Language Variation and Change, Audio-visual and Translation Studies, Critical Discourse Analysis, World Englishes and Learning, Media Discourse, Ecocritical, Post-colonial, Whiteness and Gender Studies. She is Associate Professor at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” and since her first appointment as a lecturer in 2007, she has worked towards creating strong ties with Australian Universities and cultural institutions, hosting several events in the field of Australian Studies with renowned scholars such as Bill Ashcroft, Anne Brewster, Brigitta Olubas, Behrouz Boochani and many others.

She is the author of Practices of Proximity: The Appropriation of English in Australian Indigenous Literature (2010), which won the ESSE Book Award in 2012. The book investigated the appropriation of the English language taking place in the Australian literary contact zone between an official ‘white’ Australia – the apparent owners of both the land and the English language – and Australian Indigenous peoples. Documenting language variation and rescuing the debate from seemingly peripheral locations – the ‘empty’ Great Sandy Desert, or the abject urban margin – it insisted on the complex, ultimately open-ended and multilateral ownership of the English language by all who inhabit its intersubjective space, rendering the inherited authority of who ‘owns’ meaning problematical and ethically suspect. Her second monograph, Global English, Transnational Flows: Australia and New Zealand in Translation, addressed the central, yet unresolved, theoretical debate concerning the translation of post-colonial English language varieties. Her recent research centers on Climate Change and Climate-induced Migration Discourse, Populist Discourse, and Social-media Activism with many case-studies from the Australian context.  Her most recent monograph, The Evaluation of Risk in Institutional and Newspaper Discourse: the Case of Climate Change and Migration, provides an analysis of the evaluation of climate change and climate-induced migration risks in institutional and newspaper discourse. Katherine is collaborating closely with Prof. Adone and team.

Her research interest are currently focussed on documenting, describing and reviving Indigenous languages. She has a new focus on the Indigenous languages of Pakistan, including Saraiki of the Punjab and Torwali of Swat. She has two Australian Research Council Discovery Projects one with Prof John Maynard on the history of Aboriginal missions and reserves in eastern Australia and the history of Aboriginal people who were not institutionalised. The other DP is about the practise of ‘corroboree’ by Aboriginal people in the ‘assimilation period’ of the mid C20 in Australia. She is interested in the use of Indigenous research methodologies and and community engaged research practises. She is Aboriginal Australian and her community is Ngarigu of the Snowy Mountains in south eastern Australia. Jakelin has worked closely with members of CAS such as Prof. Adone.

At Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring, Brandon facilitated a team of Miriwoong language teachers at the Miriwoong Language Nest Program, which teaches the language to school children in Kununurra. Brandon’s project investigates ways of understanding how language revitalisation programs work in Australian contexts, redefining what makes language revitalisation efforts successful in terms of how language communities see the future of their languages, and co-designing language learning programs with the local communities. His research seeks to establish theories on which methods of language revitalisation are most effective and how contextual factors of program implementation affect outcomes. Using the tools of realist inquiry, this project intends to gain a deeper understanding of how language programs work, for whom, and in which circumstances, as well as facilitate development of language programs that are sensitive to local contexts and in doing so, are more effective. Brandon is collaborating closely with Prof. Adone and team.

He received the Rubinlicht Prize for his outstanding contribution to Yiddish scholarship in 2023. He is the Chair of the Jury for the Jeonju International Awards for Promoting Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Professor Dr Dr Zuckermann is the author of Revivalistics: From the Genesis of Israeli to Language Reclamation in Australia and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2020), the seminal bestseller Israelit Safa Yafa (Israeli – A Beautiful Language; Am Oved, 2008), Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 多源造词研究 (A Study of Multisourced Neologization; East China Normal University Press, 2021), three chapters of the Israeli Tingo (Keren, 2011) and Engaging – A Guide to Interacting Respectfully and Reciprocally with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, and their Arts Practices and Intellectual Property (2015). He is a co-author of the first online Dictionary of the Barngarla Aboriginal Language (2018), and the Barngarla trilogy: (1) Barngarlidhi Manoo (‘Speaking Barngarla Together’): Barngarla Alphabet & Picture Book, 2019; (2) Mangiri Yarda (‘Healthy Country’): Barngarla Wellbeing and Nature, 2021; and (3) Wardlada Mardinidhi (‘Bush Healing’): Barngarla Plant Medicines, 2023. He is the editor of Burning Issues in Afro-Asiatic Linguistics (2012), Jewish Language Contact (2014), a special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, and the co-editor of Endangered Words, Signs of Revival (2014).

Professor Zuckermann was elected fellow of the Academy of Oriental Scholars (Shanghai) in 2011 and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in 2014. He was President of the Australian Association for Jewish Studies in 2017-2023, President of AustraLex in 2013-2015, Chief Investigator in an NHMRC research project assessing language revival and mental health in 2017-2021, Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Fellow in 2007–2011, and Gulbenkian Research Fellow at Churchill College Cambridge in 2000-2004.

He has been an elected board member of the Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL). He has been Consultant and Expert Witness in (forensic) linguistics, (corpus) lexicography and trademarks in court cases all over the globe.

Professor Zuckermann is the founder of Revivalistics, a new global, comparative, trans-disciplinary field of enquiry surrounding language reclamation, revitalization and reinvigoration. On 14 September 2011 he launched, with the Barngarla Aboriginal communities of Eyre Peninsula, South Australia, the reclamation of the Barngarla language. He has been closely involved with many other language revivals in Australia (e.g. Bayoongoo, Western Australia, and Nharangga, South Australia) and all over the globe.

Zuckermann is Professor (Level E) at Flinders University (Adelaide), Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, Australian Catholic University (Sydney) and Visiting Professor at Middlebury College (Vermont, USA) and Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel). He has taught at the University of Adelaide (2011-2024), University of Queensland (2006-2011), University of Cambridge, National University of Singapore, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, East China Normal University, Shanghai International Studies University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and University of Miami. He has been Research Fellow at Tel Aviv University; Rockefeller Foundation’s Study and Conference Center, Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy; Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Institute for Advanced Study, La Trobe University (Melbourne); Mahidol University (Bangkok); and Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyūjo (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Tokyo). He has been Denise Skinner Scholar at St Hugh’s College Oxford, Scatcherd European Scholar at the University of Oxford, and scholar at the United World College of the Adriatic (Italy).