Teaching Experience

Staff Council / Personalrat

Since 2015, I have been an elected member of our university's staff council. While I have always represented our academic staff at the University of Koblenz (University of Koblenz/Landau), I have also held the following positions:

No other status group at our university is as diverse as the one for the academic staff. With over 50 different types of work contracts (Arbeitsverträge), it has always been imperative that I take part in specific training geared towards the specific needs of our academic staff. Over the years, I have attended training seminars in the following areas:

The broad spectrum of the academic staff consists of individuals, for example, with a limited contract on account of WissZeitVG, a temporary position on account of personal leave (Vertretung), a permanent employee contract (Angestellte) and a civil-servant agreement (Beamte). Even our apl. Profs. belong to our status group. With such a diverse group of individuals, there is always a lot of work to be done. For instance, I believe that the following three areas require attention in the coming years:

Lastly, a big THANK-YOU for our Chancellor, Herr Ludewig! For the past eight years, I was fortunate enough to have a minimal exemption (Freistellung) from my regular teaching duties, so that I could focus more on the various Staff-Council activities. Moreover, the English Department was lucky to have compensation for my exemption. As a result, more than a half dozen part-time colleagues benefited from the generosity of our Chancellor as they were able to have their limited contracts prolonged and/or bumped up during my exemption.

Research

While my current academic LfbA-contract does not allocate any time towards research, I do find some freetime from time-to-time in order to expand my horizon and to titillate my mind. Since my arrival in the department in 2008, English phonetics and phonology have always interested me.

For the past couple of semesters, however, my interest has honed in on the pronunciation of Middle English (ME), in particular in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. While challenging, I enjoy phonemically transcribing parts of this ME text, so that others may read it aloud in its original pronunciation (or my interpretation of the original pronunciation). Let's take the first few lines of "The Prologue" as an example:

In addition to creating a phonemic transcription, I am also interested in studying how the pronunciation of English has changed over the centuries. For instance, I want to discover unfamiliar sounds. A case in point is /x/ in druːxt in the above snippet . While this sound can still be heard in some varieties of Scottish English and Irish English, it is mostly absent from the so-called standard varieties of English. I also want to discover how current familiar sounds followed a very different pattern in ME. The voicing of the two th's (i.e. /ð/ and /θ/) examplifies this point. The determiner that, for instance, had a voiceless th-sound in ME. And lastly, as my doctoral thesis dealt in part with the articulation of the 18th letter of the English alphablet, I am curious as to the general articulatory development of r in English. In ME, it is often trilled. In Shakespeare's day, a major change occurs as it "loses" it trill and becomes a central approximant. That's right, Shakespeare also articulated his r's. So, when did standard British English become non-rhotic? That is for you to discover!