About

I am a young-career researcher and lecturer in linguistics, specialising in corpus-based analyses of diverse multimodal phenomena in signed and spoken interaction. In my research, I adopt a strong comparative approach drawing on directly comparable data to work on different spoken and signed languages to achieve a better understanding of our human capacity to do language, linking the fields of gesture studies and sign language linguistics into linguistic theory.

I was trained as a linguist as part of my MA (2013-2015), focusing on spoken language structure and processes. Yet focusing on spoken languages only tells half of the story of how language also works in its full visuo-spatial capacity, as in the case of SLs. 

My scientific journey with SLs began in 2016 when I was awarded a Research Fellow grant by the F.R.S-FNRS to pursue a PhD within the LSFB-Lab at the University of Namur, supervised by Dr. L. Meurant and Dr. C. Bolly. That very same year, I was also granted a first Fulbright award to teach at atop Liberal Arts Colleges in the United States (Grinnell College, Iowa).

After defending my PhD, I was granted two prestigious post-doctoral fellowships from the Fulbright Commission and the Belgian-American Educational Foundation (BAEF) to work at Gallaudet University in Washington D.C. (2021-2022). With Dr. Shaw, I was co-PI of a project called “Gesture and sign beyond borders”. Resulting from our collaboration, we published a first paper in Frontiers (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2022.780124/full). We are also currently co editing a special volume exclusively devoted to the interactional infrastructure of SLs (to appear in Sign Language Studies, Fall 2023) and co-organized a Panel on that same topic at the 18th International Pragmatics Conference.

I will soon start my MSCA journey at NTNU to work with L. Ferrara on a project comparing NTS and LSFB.