Profile Dr. Danièle Klapproth

Danièle Klapproth has been working at the English department as a lecturer in linguistics since 1997. Her main teaching and research interests are in anthropological linguistics and sociolinguistics, in critical discourse analysis, and in the study of narrative and performance, focusing in particular on questions of language, power, and identity. She holds a PhD in English Linguistics from the University of Berne, and an M.A. degree in English Literature and Linguistics, and in General Linguistics, also from the University of Berne. 

Her long-standing interest in narrative as social practice took her to Australia in the 1990s, where she was a Visiting Scholar at Monash University, Melbourne, and at Melbourne University, and where she carried out intensive fieldwork in Aboriginal communities in Central Australia. In 2004 she published Narrative as Social Practice: Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions (Mouton de Gruyter), an exploration of the cross-cultural variability of narrative practice and its wider implications for cross-cultural understanding.

More recently her research has focused on exploring various forms of discursive practice (from performance texts in refugee theatre to representational practices in the media and in politics) in contexts of migration, cultural diversity and multicultural co-existence.