Co-Directors
Prof. Dany Adone
Dany Adone is Professor and Chair of Applied English Linguistics at the University of Cologne. In Australia, she is also an Adjunct Professor associated with the College of Indigenous Futures, Arts & Society at CDU, a Visiting Professor at AIATSIS, a Visiting Scholar at the Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring Language and Culture Centre in Kununurra, and Associate Professor at the University of Sydney, where she is also a member of the Sydney Indigenous Research Network and Sydney Centre for Language Research. She has lived in Arnhem Land/NT, Australia for over five years.
Together with Prof. Neumeier she has launched the Dr. R. Marika Chair for Australian Studies at the University of Cologne (2009-2014) and acted as the director for the Linguistics section. She organises regularly workshops on Indigenous languages of Australia at the University of Cologne and Charles Darwin University. She offers regular courses on Australian Languages. Her research focuses on Language Endangerment and Language Contact in Indigenous Australia. She has conducted field work in Australia since 1992 and works mostly with several Indigenous communities in Arnhem Land.
Among her most recent publications are Miriwoong Sign Language Dictionary (2018, with A. Armstrong and K.J. Olawsky), and Fire, Water and Land in Indigenous Australia (2019, with M.A. Brück). She has also edited a special issue of Learning Communities: International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts on Indigenous Sign Languages in 2015 and is a member of the editorial board of ab-Original: Journal of Indigenous Studies and First Nations’ and First Peoples’ Cultures (Penn State Press).
Prof. Beate Neumeier
Beate Neumeier is Professor of English at the University of Cologne. Her research is in gender, performance, and postcolonial studies. She is the editor of the e-journal Gender Forum and published widely on women’s writing, Anglophone drama, contemporary British-Jewish literature, postcolonial literatures and Australian studies.
Together with her colleague Prof. Adone she has launched the DAAD-funded Dr. R. Marika Chair for Australian Studies at the University of Cologne (2009-2014), and organised its Literary/ Cultural Studies section. Together they initiated collaborative research and exchange projects with Australian colleagues, and established an Australian Studies program at the University of Cologne. In 2015 they set up a network between German universities to develop an online Australian Studies project. She is also current president of the German Australian Studies Association (GASt).
Among her book publications are Engendering Realism and Postmodernism: Contemporary Women Writers in Britain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), Dichotonies: Gender and Music (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2009), Gothic Renaissance (Manchester UP, 2014), coedited with Elisabeth Bronfen, and Decolonizing the Landscape: Indigenous Cultures in Australia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), coedited with Kay Schaffer. Currently she is preparing a monograph on Kim Scott and Alexis Wright.
Prof. Heinz Antor
Heinz Antor, Professor of English Literature, studied English, French, and Applied Linguistics at Erlangen and Oxford (UK).
He completed his PhD in post-war twentieth-century British fiction in Würzburg and wrote his habilitation on the history of the English campus novel from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. From 1986 to 1995 he taught at the University of Würzburg. In 1995 he became Professor of English Literature at the University of Düsseldorf, and in 1998/9 he additionally worked in that capacity at the University of Bremen. In 1999 he was appointed Professor of English Literature at Cologne. From 2001 to 2005, Antor was President of the Association for the Study of the New English Literatures (ASNEL, now GAPS, Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies).
He is editor of Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, the official journal of Deutscher Anglistenverband. Antor has published 11 books, among which there are English Literatures in International Contexts (2000), Inter- und Transkulturelle Studien: Theoretische Grundlagen und Interdisziplinäre Praxis (2006), Fremde Kulturen verstehen – fremde Kulturen lehren: Theorie und Praxis der Vermittlung interkultureller Kompetenz (2007) and From Interculturalism to Transculturalism: Mediating Encounters in Cosmopolitan Contexts (2010).
He teaches anglophone Australian literature from the colonial period to the present and has published numerous articles on Australian fiction, for example on Peter Carey, David Malouf, Richard Flanagan, Sam Watson, Andrew McGahan and others.
Team
Melanie Brück
Research Coordinator
Melanie A. Brück is a PostDoc Researcher and Lecturer at the Chair of Applied English Linguistics (Prof. Adone) in the English Department/University of Cologne and the Coordinator of the Language Laboratory of the Faculty of Arts & Humanities/ University of Cologne. Her research interests focus on the interaction of language and culture, multimodality, language contact, and the Indigenous languages of Australia and the Oceanic region.
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David Kern
AS-Online Coordinator
David Kern is a research assistant and lecturer in the English Department at the University of Cologne. He studied English, Philosophy and Education at the University of Cologne from 2009 to 2016 and holds a State Examination (Equals M.A.) and a German teaching degree. He is currently working on a PhD Project in Indigenous Literary Environmental Activism.
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Victoria Herche
Public Relations
Victoria Herche is a post-doctoral Researcher and Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Cologne. She is also assistant editor of Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies. After studying Theatre, Film and TV Studies, English Studies and German Studies at the University of Cologne, she concluded a PhD project on “The Adolescent Country – Re-Imagining Youth and Coming of age in Contemporary Australian film” to be published in Universitätsverlag Winter (2020).
Thomas Batchelor
Events Coordinator
Thomas studied at the University of Sydney until 2017 and holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in linguistics. Since graduating with First Class Honours, he is now working as a Research Assistant in the English Department at the University of Cologne, where he is also working on a PhD project on language change and contact in Australian Kriol around Kununurra.
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