As a linguist I am interested in all the different ways language and communication are crucial within the challenging areas of medicine and health. 

In my PhD thesis I analysed the career of the nowadays highly contested term "schizophrenia" within everyday German language from 1908 until 2009. The thesis aims to trace the surprisingly quick adoption of the psychiatric term into non-psychiatric discourses, the different patterns of use as well as its meaning changes over the course of the 20th century. Methodologically, the research drew on corpus linguistic analysis combined with qualitative semantic and discourse analysis and the field of history of knowledge. (Cf. also the SNSF project "Schizophrenia": Reception, semantic shift, and criticism of a concept in the 20th century“).

Together with Anke Maatz and Henrike Wiemer (Zurich), I am currently working on the project „Let’s talk about it! But how? Considering the verbalization of mental illness experience from psychiatric and linguistic perspectives“. The project is situated within content and conversation analysis but we are also trying to find ways how one could combine these qualitative methods with quantitative analytics.

Additionally, I have founded the DFG Network >Linguistik und Medizin< together with my colleagues Marina Iakushevich (Innsbruck) and Theresa Schnedermann (Mannheim).