Catherine Laliberté
Catherine is a postdoctoral research assistant at LMU Munich, where she earned her BA, MA and PhD in English studies. Her research interests encompass sociolinguistics, variation and change, corpus linguistics, and language in film and popular culture generally. Her doctoral research was published by John Benjamins as a monograph under the title Urban Panamanian English (2023) . Besides working with SREL, Catherine's current academic focus includes an exploration of the language of telecinematic historical fiction and further work on Panamanian English and other Englishes.
Melanie Keller
Melanie is a PhD candidate and research assistant at LMU Munich. She graduated from the College of Charleston, South Carolina, before earning her MA in English studies at LMU. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, variation and change, gender & sexuality, and Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Her ongoing doctoral research investigates Korean English from an SLA perspective by comparing the English as a Second Language (ESL) of Korean American immigrants to English spoken by Koreans living in South Korea.
Julian Mader
Julian works in English Historical Linguistics at LMU. Previously, he held positions at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. His main research and teaching interests include language variation and change across different historical periods of English, corpus linguistics, morphosyntax, and spelling/orthography. For his PhD project on language variation and change in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English, he compiled a corpus of English patient letters from British psychiatric hospitals. In an earlier research project, he investigated the role of morphosyntactic simplification and dialect contact in the loss of thou V-st in English, working with Judith Huber and Christine Elsweiler. This research builds on the Zulassungsarbeit he completed as a student of English language and literature, physics, and pedagogy at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. He has also worked as an editorial assistant for Anglia: Journal of English Philology and the book series Advances in Historical Linguistics (Language Science Press).
Nicole Benker
Nicole is a PhD candidate at LMU Munich and has previously completed an MA in English Linguistics and an MA in General Linguistics, both at LMU. She is mostly interested in empirically investigating the cognitive basis of language variation and change. Her current work focuses on the recent development of pragmatic markers from a usage-based perspective. The project specifically investigates how compositional sentences, such as I am not going to lie to you, develop into mitigators such as not gonna lie. Previously, she has worked for the Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing (IPS), where she assisted with and conducted research on speech production and perception with persons who stutter and non-clinical participants.
Alex Thaler
Alex is an MA in English Studies student at LMU Munich. He earned his BA in English Studies from Fordham University in New York City, USA where he held a copy-editing position for the Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal. His primary academic interests include literary canonization, task-based models for English as a Second Language instruction, and multimodality in SLA. He currently engages with SLA theories in praxis through his work with students in Munich.