Conferences
NEL-5
On March 10, 2025, JLU Giessen, organised NEL-5 (Nachwuchstagung für Englische Linguistik) for master’s and early-career researchers. The conference provided a great opportunity for young researchers to present their research, exchange ideas, and connect with other scholars. The talks and poster presentations offered deeper insights into various topics including linguistic epicentres, pragmatic variation and diachronic development in World Englishes. Other topics covered digital Ghanian English, grammatical variation in learner English, and political discourse analysis. Participants from Würzburg included Aditya Upadhyaya and Carina Stick, who gave a talk on their PhD projects. NEL continues to be an important setting for young researchers to get valuable feedback and build stronger connections within the research community. We look forward to the next event.
NEL-4
On March 27, 2023, the LETS Team of the University of Bonn welcomed Master- and PhD-students from the Universities Bonn, Gießen and Würzburg for the fourth ‘Nachwuchstagung für Englische Linguistik’, NEL-4. The talks and poster presentations offered intriguing insights into current research projects and the whole event provided great networking opportunities for the mostly early-career researchers. Partcipants from Würzburg included Stanislaus Kruschinski and Dominik Schoppa (Würzburg/Augsburg) who gave a talk on their MA and PhD project, respectively. We are happy that NEL has become tradition and look forward to meeting again in Gießen in 2025 for NEL-5.
NEL-3
On February 22, 2021, the linguistics division of the Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik welcomed Master- and PhD-students from the Universities of Bonn and Gießen for the third ‘Nachwuchstagung für Englische Linguistik’, NEL-3, a conference for young researchers in English linguistics. Organised as an online event by Prof. Dr. Carolin Biewer and her staff, the conference aimed at providing a platform for young scholars of the three university to present their research, exchange ideas and network during break-out room coffee sessions.
The ten presentations covered various linguistic subfields, focussing on pragmatic variation in World Englishes, bridging the gap between linguistics and didactics, documenting the linguistic landscape in urban spaces, and introducing and discussing various methods. Even though we had hoped to be able to meet again in person, the online event was a nice alternative to stay in touch and learn about the work in progress of current Master- and PhD-students. With its third edition, we now consider NEL a tradition and look forward to seeing familiar faces and meeting a new generation of junior researchers in Bonn for NEL-4.
NEL-1
On July 1, 2016, the linguistics division of the Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik welcomed Master- and PhD-students from the Universities of Bonn and Giessen to Würzburg for the first ‘Nachwuchstagung für Englische Linguistik’, NEL-1, a conference for young researchers in English linguistics. Organised by Prof. Dr. Carolin Biewer and her staff, the conference aimed at providing a platform for exchanging ideas and feedback for young researchers of the three universities involved, but also – and not less importantly – it was designed to remind young scholars that they are not alone in their struggles for academic success.
The nine presentations covered various linguistic subfields, such as the phonetics and phonology of language acquisition, culture and the lexicon of World Englishes, the role of motivation in language learning, and methods and perspectives of discourse analysis in forensic linguistics. In addition, a number of Master- and PhD-students as well as postdoctoral researchers presented their research projects during a poster session.Despite the tightly packed schedule, there was plenty of time to socialise and network during a potluck lunch prepared by the English linguistics staff from Würzburg University – as well as over dinner at a nearby Greek restaurant. We very much hope that NEL will become a valuable tradition for many generations of junior researchers to come.
FJUEL 16
From Beowulf to New Englishes to the way Madonna drops her /r/s – on September 16, 2016 the Institute of English Linguistics Würzburg was host to the 6th FJUEL – Forum Junge Englische Linguistik in Bayern – during which young linguists showed how varied, new, and exciting linguistic research can be. 27 people, all of them graduate students and post-doc researchers, gathered for a day packed with 13 talks, during which presenters had the opportunity to talk about their ongoing work, and discuss theories, methods, and results with their peers.
On the next day the conference was complemented by a workshop on general research methods (i.e., quantitative vs qualitiative, diachronic vs. synchronic), and on how to do research with pre-existing as well as self-compiled corpora using regular expressions. This workshop was held by Ninja Schulz and Patrick Maiwald.
