Barbara Mertins Invited as Visiting Professor to Stanford University
- Top News
- Research
- People
The Gerda Henkel Foundation has awarded Professor Barbara Mertins, linguist at TU Dortmund University, a fellowship that will enable her to join Stanford University as a visiting professor. She will teach and conduct research at the Department of German Studies at the prestigious university in California from January to the end of March next year.
“I am very excited at the prospect of returning to the US after almost 20 years, even though I am aware that life there has changed a lot since then. I am very much looking forward to my new environment and the intellectual and personal encounters with researchers and students at Stanford,” says Barbara Mertins. At TU Dortmund University, she is Professor of Empirical and Experimental Linguistics of German – Psycholinguistics at the Institute for Diversity Studies, where among other things she uses the eye-tracking laboratory to explore how the grammars of various native languages influence the cognition and perception of the environment in monolingual and bilingual people.
With its “Visiting Professorships”, the Gerda Henkel Foundation has been promoting academic collaboration between Stanford University and German universities since 2009. German scholars visit the Department of German Studies at the US-American university for a term to teach and exchange ideas with international colleagues. Among other things, the aim of the program is to expand research activities at Stanford that are related to Germany.
Professor Mertins will hold two seminars at Standford University: “Multilingualism in German-speaking Contexts” is intended for students at Bachelor’s level. For Master’s students and doctoral candidates, who in the US-American university system also attend courses, Mertins will teach “Psycholinguistics of Multilingualism”. In addition, she will hold the Gerda Henkel Lecture on a topic of her choice within a series of public lectures.
About Professor Barbara Mertins
Barbara Mertins has been Professor of Empirical and Experimental Linguistics of German – Psycholinguistics at the Institute for Diversity Studies of the Department of Cultural Studies at TU Dortmund University since 2014. Apart from psycholinguistics, her research interests include experimental linguistics methods and contemporary linguistics. She is head of the psycholinguistics laboratories.