Honorary Doctorate for Romance Studies Scholar Prof. em. Dr. Elisabeth Gülich
At the Dies Academicus 2025, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Zurich awarded an honorary doctorate to Prof. em. Dr. Elisabeth Gülich. The Romance linguist is held in the highest esteem both within and beyond her field. Her research on spoken French, text linguistics, everyday oral narration, and conversation analysis has been particularly influential. Groundbreaking interdisciplinary work on medical communication has demonstrated how linguistic conversation research can contribute to the diagnosis of clinically relevant conditions.
Currently, she is involved in a collaborative project between the Romance Departments of Zurich and Freiburg, focusing on written and oral narratives of remembrance related to forced labour and deportation in Nazi camps (Thomas Klinkert, Stefan Pfänder: “Emergent Remembering II: Saying the Unsayable”).
A detailed portrait of the honouree can be found here.
