Director
Dr. Bettina Beinhoff
Bettina Beinhoff is Senior Lecturer in English and Applied Linguistics, and Course Leader for the MA Intercultural Communication. Her main research interests include the role of language in the negotiation and development of identity in cross-cultural and intercultural contexts as well as ideologies and attitudes related to language in the wider sense. She is particularly interested in second language acquisition and multilingual settings. Recently, she has been working on sociolinguistic and intercultural issues in constructed or invented languages, both from the perspective of the design process and how listeners and fans engage with these languages across cultures.
Bettina has also worked extensively on second and foreign speech development, especially on intelligibilty and accentedness of second and foreign accents in English. She has recently finished a British Academy funded project into speech perception within the CEFR which investigated the development of intelligibility and perception of accentedness through the different stages of acquiring a foreign language.
For a list of recent publications and presentations see: https://www.aru.ac.uk/people/bettina-beinhoff
Members of Staff, Academic Visitors and Research Fellows
Dr. Melanie Bell
Melanie uses a combination of big data (corpus linguistics), acoustic analysis (phonetics) and experimentation (laboratory phonology and psycholinguistics) to explore how people use the sounds of speech to convey the meanings they want to express – and how listeners process these sounds to extract a meaning from them. She is currently especially interested in exploring the commonalities between language acquisition and other types of learning, including machine learning. A recent project, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Tübingen Quantitative Linguistics group, used computational modelling to better understand how words are learned in a second or third language; the results highlighted the particular problems posed by homophones, words with the same pronunciation but different meanings. Bell and her colleagues are currently expanding the model to explore language learning at sentence level.
Dr. Sean Campbell
Sean Campbell is Reader in Media and Culture at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. His research interests are in popular culture, Irish studies and ‘race’/ethnicity, which include publications such as Irish Blood, English Heart: Second-Generation Irish Musicians in England (Cork University Press 2011), and Beautiful Day: Forty Years of Irish Rock (co‐authored with Gerry Smyth 2005). Dr Campbell has been an invited speaker at the University of Helsinki, the University of London and the National University of Ireland. He is also on the editorial board of the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, and is a member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, the British Association for Irish Studies, and the Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Association. Dr Campbell has appeared on Channel 4 News, the BBC World Service, RTÉ, Radio Ulster, DW‐TV (Germany), CBC TV and Radio (Canada), and ABC Radio (Australia).
Dr. Anne Ife
Anne Ife is a Research Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. Her research interests are second language learning, the policy and practice of second language use in the modern globalised world, and specifically language diversity and language policy in Europe. She has written Spanish teaching materials for the BBC and the Open University and has published various articles on aspects of second language acquisition. Dr Ife is co‐editor with Janet Cotterill of Language across Boundaries (BAAL/Continuum 2001), and with Guido Rings of Neo‐colonial Mentalities in Contemporary Europe? Language and Discourse in the Construction of Identities (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008).
Dr. Vahid Parvaresh
Dr. Vahid Parvaresh is a linguist interested in investigating how various dimensions of linguistic knowledge and language use intersect in the creation of meaning. In this respect, he has a keen interest in the acquisition and use of pragmatic particles as well as vague expressions. Furthermore, Vahid explores the social dimensions of language and communication, especially how current globalised practices shape, and are shaped by, local contexts. He is very much interested in conducting research which enjoys transdisciplinary relevance and allows for pursuing and generating knowledge that can be seen as relevant across other disciplinary boundaries. His publications, which are mainly in the broad area of Persian/English Linguistics, have appeared in leading international journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Discourse Processes, International Review of Pragmatics, The Language Learning Journal,Linguistic Landscape and Corpus Pragmatics, to name only a few.
Dr. Sebastian Rasinger
Sebastian is an applied linguist researching ‘the theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which language is a central issue’ (Brumfit 1997: 91). He is interested in bilingualism, migration, and ethnic and cultural identities, as well as the representation of minority groups more generally (linguistic, ethnic, religious, sexual) in public and media discourse, using methods derived from both corpus linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis.
He also has a keen interest in the teaching of research methodology and has written a book on quantitative methods, published in its 2nd edition by Bloomsbury Academic in 2013.
He has recently (with Guido Rings, eds.) published the Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Communication (2020, Cambridge University Press) and is currently writing a textbook on that topic (with Guido Rings, forthcoming, CUP).
Prof. Guido Rings
Guido is Professor of Postcolonial Studies and co-founder of German as a Foreign Language and iMex, the first internet journals in Europe for their respective fields. He is also co-editor of iMex and was visiting professor at Giessen University (2020 and 2016), The Global University of Seoul (2013) and Düsseldorf University (2010).
He has widely published within different areas of postcolonial studies and cultural studies. This includes the authored books The Other in Contemporary Migrant Cinema: Imagining a New Europe? (2018/2016), The Conquest Upside Down/La Conquista desbaratada (2010), Conquered Conquerors/Eroberte Eroberer (2005) and Narrating against the Tide/Erzählen gegen den Strich (1996) as well as a wide range of volumes and special issues, such The Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Communication (with Sebastian Rasinger 2020), US-Mexican Encounters in Contemporary Film (with Stephen Trinder 2020), Business in Mexico (with Antonio Manuel Ciruela Lorenzo 2017), Global identities in contemporary Mexican theatre and performance (with Verena Dolle 2014), Identity and Otherness in contemporary Chicano cinema (2012), The Other side of migration/La otra cara de la migración (2009), Neo-colonial mentalities in contemporary Europe (with Anne Ife 2008) and European Cinema: Inside Out (with Ricki Morgan-Tamosunas 2003). Guido is also author of more than 50 refereed articles.
While his research focuses on concepts of culture and alterity in contemporary European and Latin American narrative or film, other work explores socio-political and cultural aspects of European discourse and identity construction in the 20th and 21st century. Within this framework, he has given numerous keynote speeches, invited papers and public lectures at a wide range of international institutions, he has worked as international expert for different funding initiatives of the European Commission, the AHRC and the Irish Research Council, and he has co-organised several international conferences.
Prof. Bronwen Walter
Bronwen Walter is Emeritus Professor of Irish Diaspora Studies at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, and internationally recognised for her research on Irish migration to Britain and the wider experiences of the Irish diaspora. Her academic publications include a monograph ‘Outsiders inside: whiteness, place and Irish women’ (Routledge, 2001) and articles and chapters on a wide range of aspects of Irish emigration and settlement abroad. She has made substantial contributions to policy and co-authored the widely‐cited report for the Commission for Racial Equality Discrimination and the Irish Community in Britain (1997) (with Mary J. Hickman). Her report Irish emigrants and Irish communities abroad was produced for the Irish Government Task Force on Policy Regarding Emigrants (2002). She has been awarded grants from the ESRC, the British Academy and the Irish Government.
Other contributors and advisors
Prof. Sarah Barrow
Sarah Barrow is Professor of Film and Media and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Arts and Humanities at the University of East of Anglia in Norwich, UK. Her main research interests are in Latin American cinema and cultural memory with a particular focus on representations of political violence in contemporary Peruvian cinema. Professor Barrow has also published on post‐colonial issues in British/European/Latin American cinema. See for example Contemporary Peruvian Cinema: History, Identity and Violence on Screen (Tauris 2018), ‘Images of Peru: A National Cinema in Crisis’ in Shaw & Dennison Latin American Cinema (2005) and ‘Stretching the Limits: Hybridity in Contemporary British Cinema’ in Rings and Morgan‐Tamosunas European Cinema: Inside Out (2003), amongst others.
For more details see https://www.uea.ac.uk/film-television-media/people/profile/sarah-barrow
Prof. Katrin Biebighäuser
Katrin Biebighäuser is Professor of German as a Foreign Language at the University of Education, Heidelberg, Germany. Her main research interests are in foreign language learning and digital media in language learning. Two of her most recent and most distinguished publications are ‘Virtuelle Erinnerungsorte für interkulturelles Lernen? Ergebnisse der Erforschung eines Kooperationsprojektes in der virtuellen Welt Second Life’. In: ÖDaF: Dem Lernen auf der Spur. ÖDaFMitteilungen 31 (2). Göttingen: V&R unipress 2015, 67-74, and Fremdsprachenlernen in virtuellen Welten. Empirische Untersuchung eines Begegnungsprojekts zum interkulturellen Lernen (Narr 2014).
Dr. Cécile Brochard
Cécile Brochard is ‘professeur agrégée’ in Modern Literature. She completed her doctoral thesis in 2012 at the University of Nantes, where she is lecturer in Comparative Literature and French Literature. She has published several articles on Spanish‐American literature, and co‐edited La Folie: creation ou destruction? in 2011. Her thesis Écrire le pouvoir: les romans du dictateur à la première personne has been published by Éditions Champion (2014).
Alessandra Caggiano
Alessandra Caggiano leads two successful companies in Cambridge bridging across the many cultures represented in the city. In particular, the social enterprise she founded, the e‐Luminate Foundation, relies on the support of volunteers, many of them with a multicultural makeup. Cultural awareness is fostered and promoted as one of the key features enriching the volunteers’ experience at her company. Alessandra has also taught on numerous intercultural communication modules, and she is a Trustee at La Dante, the Italian Cultural Centre in Cambridge.
Dr. Joaquín Castillo de Mesa
Joaquín Castillo de Mesa joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Málaga as assistant professor in 2010. His area of expertise are Social Work, Industrial Relations and Human Resources. His research interests include diffusion and adoption of innovations as well as analysis of diversity, especially through social networks. Since 2004, Joaquín has been involved in various interdisciplinary and cross‐European research projects, collaborating with institutions in non-profit and for‐profit sectors, such as the Department of Social Services of Málaga Council, the Society for Planning and Development, the Department of Active Labour Policies of Málaga Council and the National Network of Employment in Spain.
Prof. Marie-Therese Claes
Marie-Therese Claes has a professorship at the Louvain School of Management and the ICHEC Brussels Business School in Belgium. She holds a PhD in Philosophy and Arts, an MBA from the University of Louvain, and she has over twenty years of teaching experience in Business Communication, Intercultural Communication and Intercultural Management both in Belgium and as visiting professor at different universities worldwide, including KIMBA Kasetsart University in Bangkok, Thailand, and Aalto University School of Economics Helsinki in Finland. Marie-Therese is past president of SIETAR Europa (Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research) and of EWMD (European Women Management Development, EFMD). She has published widely in the field of Business Communication and Intercultural Communication, and has worked with several companies as a consultant. Key publications include Culturele communicatie en waarden in internationaal perspectief, 3rd edition, with M. Gerritsen, Bussum: Coutinho 2011, and Global Leadership Practices. A Cross-Cultural Management Perspective. Ed. with Bettina Gehrke, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2014.
Dr. Maria Eugenia Gonzalez Cortés
Maria Eugenia Gonzalez Cortés has a Ph.D. in journalism, and she has worked in the University of Málaga since 2002. As an invited lecturer and researcher she has conducted several projects in foreign universities, such as the Technological Institute of Monterrey (Mexico) and La Sapienza (University of Rome). She has written many articles in specialized magazines and given papers in many conferences with a focus on international communication and immigration. Among her titles are: The construction of reality in the migration process. The mass media influence (publication of her doctoral thesis), ‘Consolidation of the publications for foreigners in Spain’ (in Revista Latina de Comunicación Social), ‘The media’s approach to cultural diversity in Europe: The Italian case’ (in Cuadernos Interculturales), and ‘Future communication professionals facing the migratory phenomenon: a pilot study’ (in Observatorio OBS Journal).
Dr. Werner Delanoy
Werner Delanoy is Associate Professor of English at Klagenfurt University, Austria. His research focuses on English teaching and learning methodology and applied intercultural theory. This includes publications such as Learning with Literature in the EFL Classroom (ed. with M. Eisenmann and F. Matz 2015), Future Perspectives of English Language Teaching (2008), Culture Studies in the EFL‐Classroom (ed. 2006), Literaturdidaktik im Dialog (ed. 2004), Fremdsprachlicher Literaturunterricht (2002), and numerous articles and conference papers.
Prof. Verena Dolle
Verena Dolle is Professor of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literatures and Cultures at Giessen University, Germany (since 2009). She is also founding member of CEYLA, the International Centre for the Study of European and Latin American Literatures and Cultures (Medellín, Colombia), and she is Vice‐Dean of the Faculty of Languages, Literatures and Cultures of Giessen University. She has published several books and numerous articles, in particular on colonial literature, perceptions of space in early modern and contemporary literature, representations of urban violence in Latin American literature and film, and representations of home and unhomeliness in Latin American and lusophone poetry.
Dr. María Auxiliadora Durán Durán
Auxi Durán is senior lecturer at Málaga University (Spain). Since 2012 her teaching in the Degree in East Asia Studies (Korea) is focused on conflict management and intercultural studies. Among her primary research interests are gender and migration, with articles such as ‘La victimización de las mujeres marroquíes en Málaga’ (in Cuadernos de Política Criminal 1998) or ‘Imágenes de la inmigración y feminidad: espacios de maniobra en La novia de Lázaro de Fernando Merinero’ (in Iberoamericana 2009). Currently, she is particularly interested in combining three broad fields of her research: intercultural studies, gender and criminology with a focus on discourses of/about Muslim women.
Dr. Goretti Faya Ornia
Dr. Goretti Faya Ornia graduated in Translation and Interpreting from the University of Valladolid. She specializes in medical and technical translation in English (University Jaume I) and German (University of Córdoba), and has professional experience as a translator, reviewer, proofreader and coordinator of translation projects. She was a lecturer and researcher at the University of Oviedo for six years (where she earned her international doctorate), and currenty works at the University of Valladolid (Campus of Soria). Her research pivots on specialized translation (mainly on medical translation), text genres, text typologies, contrastive linguistics and linguistic corpora.
Prof. Maria Luisa Gómez Jiménez
Prof. Dr. María Luisa Gómez Jiménez is Associate Professor with tenure of Administrative Law at the University of Málaga (Spain). She has been Visiting Researcher at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and at the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Law School. She leads a Journal on Housing and Urban issues, and a research group on the same topics. María Luisa is also Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Social Work, Sociology and Social Policy at Bournemouth University, and she acts as Liason on Public Policy for the Higher Education Technology and Learning Association (New York). Maria Luisa researches and publishes in the area of Administrative Law and Public Policy, especially on land planning and housing law in an international context, social rights, e-health, global administrative law and human rights. She supervises papers and dissertations in the area of public policies, public law and intercultural studies. Contact Details: mlgomez@uma.es/fpmlgomez@gmail.com; For papers see: https://marialuisagomezjimenez.academia.edu/
Prof. Tanius Karam
Tanius Karam is Professor of Communication Studies at Mexico City’s UAM, since 2002. His teaching experience in more than 20 universities in Mexico and Europe includes theories and methodologies of communication studies, semiotics applied to mass media, and the relationship between literature and communication. He completed his PhD in Communication Studies at Madrid’s Complutense University (Madrid, Spain), and he is member of numerous associations, including the “Mexican Association of Communication Researchers” (AMIC), the Latin American Association of Communication Research (ALAIC), the “Latin American Association Discourse Studies” (ALED) and the “UC Mexicanistas” network. Prof. Karam has published key monographs such as Human Rights in the Mexican Press (2011) and Twenty Ways to Name Mass Media (2010), and he is editor of From North to South: Popular Music and Cities in Latin America (2015), Discourse and Communication (2014), Counts, Cities and Heterodoxy. Essays and Testimonials about Carlos Monsivais (2012).
Dr. Emmanuelle Le Pichon-Vorstman
Emmanuelle Le Pichon-Vorstman is Assistant Professor at Toronto University, Canada. She divides her time between teaching and research in educational (socio-) linguistics, and she is particularly interested in the relationship between plurilingual development, education and communicative competence in children. She currently leads a European founded international research project (2015-2018), EDINA (EDucation of International Newly Arrived migrant pupils), which brings together policy makers, schools and researchers from Finland, Belgium and The Netherlands. The main objective of EDINA is to provide support to municipalities, schools and teachers in the reception and the integration into the school system of newly arrived pupils. She is regularly invited to give trainings for teachers in The Netherlands, Suriname and across Europe. She is author of several scientific papers on plurilingualism.
Prof. Joanne Leal
Joanne Leal is Professor of German Studies in the Department of Cultures and Languages at Birkbeck, University of London. She undertakes research in the areas of twentieth and twenty-first century German literature and film. She works particularly on gender and sexuality in literature and film and on the representation of significant social issues in the contemporary German novel, including migration, social exclusion and Islamophobia. She is also interested in constructions of the family in literature, film and other visual media and has recently co-edited the volume Picturing the Family: Media, Narrative, Memory with Silke Arnold-de Simine which appeared with Bloomsbury in 2018.
Dr Martina Moeller
Dr Martina Moeller worked from 2003 to 2006 as a lecturer in Film Studies at the International Summer School of the University of Kassel (Germany) and from 2006 to 2010 as a lecturer in German at the University of Provence (Aix‐Marseille I, France). She completed her PhD on German Rubble films at Anglia Ruskin University, and she has published articles on visual style, narration, religious aesthetics and Romantic discourse in Rubble films and on German‐speaking film staff in France and England. Martina has also co‐organised two international conferences in France and Germany: Intercultural Communication (with Ulrike Dorfmüller, University of Provence 2008; published in 2010 by Lang, Frankfurt), and Kunst und Stacheldraht (Art and Barbed Wire, with Cécile Bonnet, OFLAG VI A in Soest 2009).
Dr. F. Manuel Montalbán
Dr. F. Manuel Montalbán Peregrín is University Ombudsman and former Dean of the Faculty of Social Studies at Málaga University, Spain. As specialist in social psychology he is author of La organización psicosocial (1996), ‘Comunidad e inconsciente’ (2008) and numerous articles at the intersection of psychoanalysis, social studies and postmodern thought. More recently, he has also given papers on Korean cinema (e.g. at Granada University 2018).
Prof. Thomas Nakayama
Thomas K. Nakayama (Ph.D., University of Iowa) is Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. He is currently co-editor of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (Michigan State University Press). He was the founding editor of the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication. He is the co-author of Experiencing Intercultural Communication, Intercultural Communication In Contexts, and Human Communication and Society. He has also co-edited a number of books, including Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity, The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, and Global Dialectics in Intercultural Communication. His research focuses on developing the emerging field of critical intercultural communication, which emphasizes the role of societal influences on how intercultural communication plays out. Some of these societal influences include differing legal frameworks for seeking justice, different laws that regulate the movement of peoples around the world, as well as the role of the digital environment in shaping intercultural interaction. His research emphasizes racial, gender, sexual and national identities.
Prof. Birgit Neumann
Birgit Neumann is Professor of Anglophone and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Duesseldorf and member of several international research networks; she had guest professorships at the Universities of Cornell/Ithaca and Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Her research is dedicated to the study of the poetics and politics of Anglophone literatures as well as to British migrant literatures and cinemas. She is author, co-author and editor of a range of books and articles that explore post/colonial modes of articulation in literature and film. Specifically, her current research projects focus on the polycentric network of Anglophone world literatures and on postcolonial ekphrasis/ literary visuality. Together with Juergen Reulecke she is general editor of the series Forms of Remembering/Formen der Erinnerung (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, since 2004).
Dr. Raquel Seijas
Raquel Seijas has a PhD in journalism and has worked in the University of Málaga since 2009. She has conducted several projects in foreign universities as a guest lecturer and researcher, including the Babes‐Bolyai University (Cluj‐Napoca, Romania) and USM (University of Moldova). She has also worked as technical coordinator with migrants from Eastern Europe in the Fundación Secretariado Gitano in both Madrid and Málaga, and as a local coordinator in Participatory Action Research (PAR) projects with CIMAS, a citizens’ observatory/social watch. Raquel has written numerous reports and articles for various organisations and, amongst them, articles about immigrant women and minorities. Her articles include: “Minorities, Power and Mass Communication in Romania 1945‐2000” (topic of doctoral thesis), “Migrant women and mass media in Spain: mediated inequality” (in Revista de la Asociación Española de Investigadores en Comunicación 2014), “Spanish mass media and the gypsy community” and “The different sides of female migration and its limited impact on media” (in Vicerrectorado de Extensión Universitaria, Málaga University).
Prof. Michelle Sheehan
Michelle Sheehan, a Professor of Linguistics at Newcastle University, is a syntactician who is interested in structure, meaning, variation and change in monolingual andbilingual contexts, particularly in relation to Romance languages (European and Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Galician, and Catalan). Recently, she has been working with UK secondary school teachers through the Linguistics in MFL project, which she founded with colleagues at Universities of Birmingham, Bristol, Lancaster, and Westminster. This project makes the case that linguistics should be part of language teaching for both second language and heritage students. Current projects include a cross-linguistic study of causation and perception (with Sonia Cyrino, State University of Campinas, Brazil), a cross-linguistic study of non-finite complementation (with Jutta Hartmann) and a co-creation project funded by Language Acts and Word Making producing linguistics A-level materials (with Alice Corr, Anna Havinga, Jonathan Kasstan, Norma Schifano and Sascha Stollhans).
Dr. Shailja Sharma
Shailja Sharma is Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at DePaul University, Chicago, and an Associate Professor in the Department of International Studies. She is the Director of the MS in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies program at DePaul. Her interests include 6 postcolonial theory and literature, migration studies, citizenship and refugee incorporation in Europe and the United States.
Dr. Yasmin Temelli
Yasmin Temelli is assistant professor for Ibero-American literature and culture at Bochum University. She studied Romance Studies, political science and media studies at Düsseldorf and the Università degli Studi di Firenze. Her doctoral thesis, Writing instead of keeping silent (Schreiben statt Schweigen), published in 2009, obtained the qualification summa cum laude and received the drupa Prize 2009 as well as the ADLAF Prize 2010. Yasmin received scholarships from the DFG (German Research Foundation), the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (German National Academic Foundation) and the DAAD, and she has coedited the following key anthologies: Lateinamerika anders denken (2015), Democracia y violencia entre lo global y lo local (2014) and México: Migraciones culturales – topografías transatlánticas (2012).
Dr. Elina Tergujeff
Elina Tergujeff is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Language and Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research interests lie in second language pronunciation teaching and learning, and intelligibility, comprehensibility and accentedness of L2 speech. Tergujeffs goal is to develop L2 pronunciation teaching. Her publications include a mapping of English pronunciation teaching in Finnish schools, studies in pronunciation development of L2 Swedish and teaching experiments focussing on teaching methods. She has also co-edited a book aimed at teachers on how to teach L2 spoken communication, and she has contributed to national curriculum work in Finland.
Dr. Daniel Weston
Daniel Weston is an Assistant Professor of Sociolinguistics in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). He read English Language and Literature at BA level at the University of Oxford, and obtained his MPhil and PhD in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge. Prior to taking up a position at HKU, he was employed at Birkbeck University of London, Portsmouth University, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). His research interests include bilingual pragmatics (code-switching), World Englishes (specifically English dialect development), and the discourse analysis of gatekeeping encounters. He has published in a variety of journals on these subject areas including the Journal of Sociolinguistics, the Journal of Pragmatics, the International Journal of Bilingualism, Language and Literature, English World-Wide and the Journal of Chinese Linguistics . He is currently collaborating with the University of Cambridge on a project examining the communicative effectiveness of the undergraduate admissions interview. To this end, he is also an affiliate and visiting scholar at the Cambridge Language Sciences Interdisciplinary Research Centre.
Prof. Stephan Wolting
Stephan Wolting is Professor and Head of Intercultural Communication at Adam-Mickiewicz-University Poznan (Poland). He is also a member of the Intercultural Campus, the EMICC (European Master of Intercultural Studies), the Hochschulverband für Interkulturelle Studien (Academic Association of Intercultural Studies) and the Gesellschaft für Interkulturelle Germanistik (Scientific Society of Intercultural Studies). He has published several books and numerous articles, in particular on cultural studies, German literature as literature of otherness, academic cultures in comparison, thanatology, narratology and hermeneutics.