Current PhD Projects
| Candidate | Working title | Research areas/keywords |
| Ambrosetti, Letizia | The Subject of Climate Change: Political, Poetic, and Psychological Dimensions in Contemporary Eco-Fiction | contemporary eco-fiction; critical theory; ecocriticism; cli-fi; political-apathy; identity |
| Albrecht, Maxi | The Cultural Politics of Intelligences in 21st-Century Post-Apocalyptic and Dystopian Survival Narrative | |
| Blagojevic, Blanka | Europe East and West: Negotiations of a Blurry Borderline SNF-Project British Literary and Cultural Discourses of Europe | contemporary British travel writing, discourses of Europe, Eastern Europe in British literature and culture, Balkanism, cultural topographies |
| Fallone, Christina | t.b.a. | |
| Frey, Michaela | Bodily Encounters: Nature and Embodiment in British Poetry (2000-2017) | contemporary nature poetry, new nature writing, new materialism, ecofeminism, phenomenology, corporeality |
| Heeg, Stefanie | Anglo-Swiss Travel Accounts in the Early Modern Period | travel writing, mapping, digital humanities, grand tour, knowledge networks, cultural exchange, Switzerland in British literature, Britain in Swiss literature |
| Imboden, Tamara Dima | Structural Entanglements: Urban Experience and Narrative Structure | contemporary urban fiction; narrative structure; memory; trauma; identity; urban text; Michel de Certeau |
| Inoue, Airi | The resistance of cultural stereotyping in retellings of interaction: a study of current and former Japanese students’ resistance strategies in Switzerland | microaggressions, cultural stereotypes, identity construction, power, positioning theory, critical discourse analysis |
| Jimenez, Isabel | Race, Class, Power, and Academia 101: A Study on Contemporary Campus Novels | |
| Kacl, Eleonora | Acknowledging the Human-Animal Bond. Creating Trust and Providing Expertise in Veterinarian-Client-Health Discourse | advice, discourse analysis, expertise in health, health communication, human-animal communication, relational work, veterinarian communication |
| Kraft, Corin | Memory, Place, and the Postsouthern in Contemporary US Southern Literature | Southern studies, Southern literature, memory studies, contemporary Mississippi literature, postmodernism |
| Manson, Thomas | Remapping the outmoded in rural England, 1870–1995 | rural modernity, modernism, Walter Benjamin, Marxist theory, Englishness |
| Mauruschat, Ania | Radiophonie, Störung und Erkenntnis. Zur Epistemologie der Radiokunst am Beispiel der Katastrophenhörspiele von Andreas Ammer und FM Einheit | sound & radio studies, transnational & entangled media histories, literature & science, media archeology & digitization, avant-garde, modernism & post-modernism |
| Nisticò, Simona | The translation of linguistic impoliteness in English, French, and Italian | translation, pragmatics of fiction, interpersonal pragmatics, conflict, relational work, im/politeness |
| Ortiz, Daniel | A Brief History of Decay in American Literature | decadence and ‘late’ literature; aesthetics and metaphysics, intellectual history; 19th and 20th century American literature; horror fiction; literary vitalism and pantheism |
| Parkhowell, Lindsay | Belonging to Time: Mourning and Futurity in Afro-Diasporic Literatures | mourning, melancholy, Caribbean cosmologies, counter-modernities, jazz, performance, futurity |
| Rapcsák, Balázs | SNSF project Beckett’s Media System: A Comparative Study in Multimediality | Beckett studies, media theory, media technologies, agency, multimediality |
| Sabbioni, Sof | Fantasy, Fiction, Faction, and Fascism. A Comparative Literary and Discursive Analysis of the Contemporary U.S. American and Russian Radical Right’s Narratives of Empire | Radical Right Studies; U.S. American Literature; Russian Literature; Fiction and Fact; Comparative Literature; Speculative Fiction |
| Never-ending Closure. (Un)authorized expansion of popular culture storyworlds | ||
| Zhou, Lina | Autobiographical Narratives of Upward Mobility across Anglophone Genres | Autosociobiography; Upward mobility; Autobiographical writing; Intersectionality; Anglophone literatures; Social inequality |
Completed PhD Projects
| Candidate | Title | Research areas/keywords |
| Aerni, Anouk | The Relative Autonomy of Nature and Humans in Postmodern American Postwar Prose | ecocriticism; American postbellum literature; postmodern prose; 20th century |
| Askin, Ridvan | Narrative and Becoming: Differential Narratology Research Database: Project 103858 | Differential narratology, the transcendental and empirical |
| Bieri, Aline | Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in a Swiss Context: The Linguistic Challenges and Implications of Teaching Biology in English (CLIL) and German (non-CLIL) analyzed through the Lens of Translanguaging and Technicality Research Database: Project 3572984 | Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), second and foreign language learning and teaching, second language acquisition (SLA), conversation analysis (CA), sociolinguistics |
| Bolander, Brook | On Power in Blogs Research Database: Project 103880 | computer-mediated communication, disagreement, power |
| Caci, Ursula | Locating Gender in Space: Emily Dickinson's Conception of Gender Research Database: Project 132010 | |
| Diederich, Catherine | Framing Sensory Adjectives: A Seminatic Analysis of Sensory Language Research Database: Project 1167187 | sensory language, frame semantics, corpus linguistics
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| Ehrsam, Kristina | English as a Mediating Language in German as a Foreign Language Courses, Investigating Language Choices at Swiss University Language Centers from a Multilingua Franca Perspective | English as a lingua franca; multilingualism; foreign language teaching; construction of language expertise |
| Gottlieb, Derek | Common Nonsense: Community and Skepticism in Shakespearean Comedy | |
| Hägler, Andreas | History, Critique, Utopia: Experimental Writing in the Context of Contemporary Anglophone Literature Research Database: Project 103857 | contemporary anglophone literature, experimental literature, aesthetic theory, Adorno |
| Hänggi, Christian | Thomas Pynchon’s Sonic Fictions Research Database: Project 1454158 | Thomas Pynchon, sound studies, noise, silence, music |
| Keller, Daniela | Germany and Physics in English Fiction after 1960: A Diffractive Reading of Anglo-German Entanglements Research Database: Project 2280353 | contemporary British fiction, cultural topographies |
| Küng, Melanie | Bordering Europe: The English Channel in British Literature and Culture from the Second World War to Brexit SNSF project British Literary and Cultural Discourses of Europe | contemporary British fiction and travel writing, cultural topographies, memory studies, discourses of Europe, national identity, border studies |
| Loew, Joelle | "Communication is everything." Identities and gender at work: a linguistic perspective on agile IT Research Database: Project 4486876 | identity construction, workplace discourse, gender, agile, interactional sociolinguistics |
| Lüthi, Daniel | Space and Narrative in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Novels Research Database: Project 2280340 | Space, narratology, Terry Pratchett |
| Meier, Stefanie | Language education and the global care work economy. Mapping structural inequalities in Philippine nurse migration to Germany Research Database: Project 3572983 | political economy of language, language education and labor migration, border management, language and the international division of reproductive labor critical sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication |
| Messerli, Thomas | Repetition in Telecinematic Humour – How US American Sitcoms Employ Repetitive Patterns in the Construction of Multimodal Humour Research Database: Project 1653180 | telecinematic discourse, (linguistic) humour theories, sitcom humour, repetition and incongruity, (multimodal) discourse analysis |
| Moreillon, Olivier | Cities in Flux: Capetonian and Durbanite Literary Topographies | South Africa, post-apartheid literature, space and place, South African cities, (South) African urban studies, Mariam Akabor, Rozena Maart, Johan van Wyk, K. Sello Duiker, Bridget McNulty, Lauren Beukes |
| Osei-Bonsu, Victoria | Representations of the Other in Selected Works of Joseph Conrad | Representation and othering, postcolonial discourse and analysis |
| Quassdorf, Sixta | "A little more than kin" – Quotations as a linguistic phenomenon. A study based on quotations from Shakespeare's Hamlet | Phraseology, Quotation Studies, Shakespeare, Digital Humanities, Historical Linguistics, Pragmatics |
| Reichel, A. Elisabeth | Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives: The Poetry and Scholarship of Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict SNF-Project: Of Cultural, Poetic, and Medial Alterity | alterity, media, intermediality, sound and visual studies, notions of immediacy |
| Rudolf von Rohr, Marie-Thérèse | Persuation in Smoking Cessation Online Research Database: Project 963000 | persuasion, relational work, identity construction, discourse analysis, computer-mediated communication
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| Thurnherr, Franziska | Interpersonal Pragmatics and the Therapeutic Alliance: The Collaborative Work in Email Counseling Research Database: Project 1087057 | relational work, identity construction, (mental) health discourse, therapeutic alliance, computer-mediated communication, discourse analysis, interpersonal pragmatics |
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