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Prof. Dr. Theresa Heyd

Anglistisches Seminar/Department of English
Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
Kettengasse 12, Room 253
69117 Heidelberg
Germany

Raum: 213

Telefon: +49 6221-542820

E-Mail: theresa.heyd@as.uni-heidelberg.de

Sprechstunde: Starting April 21, 2026: Tuesdays 11am. No registration necessary.

Theresa Heyd

I joined Heidelberg’s Department of English as Chair of English Linguistics in 2024. I hold a degree in Literary Translation (English/French/German, 2004) and a PhD in English (2007) from Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. I worked as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in English Linguistics in North America (University of Texas, University of Pennsylvania) and Germany (Gießen University, Freiburg University, Freie Universität Berlin). Before joining Heidelberg University, I held positions as interim professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen and Greifswald University, and was Chair of English Linguistics at Greifswald University from 2018 to 2024.

The teaching and research at my Chair covers the broad range of synchronic English linguistics. My area of specialization is sociolinguistics understood broadly: I consider language as a social practice, emergent, embodied and implicated into our negotiations of identity and societal power. Studying English specifically provides insight into these negotiations on a global scale. My expertise and interests coalesce around three interwoven strands of sociolinguistic research:

  • English as a global resource (in particular: work on West African communities of practice and the digital diaspora; work on English in/and Germany, e.g. the sociolinguistic economy of Berlin; ideologies of English in global and mobile contexts)
  • The sociolinguistics of digital practice (in particular: digital genres, digital linguistic landscapes, digital affect and embodiment)
  • Language and gender (in particular: the linguistic construction of gender in social media; pronouns and pronominal discourse; language ideologies of gender)

My current research project (Cringe: Ästhetik und diskursive Praxis der Schamlust) is funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung and carried out in collaboration with Heide Volkening at Greifswald University. It addresses the discursive practice of digital affect and embodiment in digital re/productions of cringe.

Curriculum Vitae

*March 2, 1980 

1999-2004: studies in literary translation (English, French, German) at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf and University of Reading (funded by the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes) 

2007: PhD in English, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf (summa cum laude, supervisor: Dieter Stein, funded by the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes)

2008-2009: lecturer, University of Texas 

2009-2011: postdoctoral researcher, University of Pennsylvania (funded by a DFG research fellowship) 

2011: postdoctoral researcher, Gießen University 

2011-2015: postdoctoral researcher, Freiburg University (funded by a DFG research grant in the working group CyberCreole, PI: Christian Mair) 

2015-2017: postdoctoral researcher, Freie Universität Berlin 

2016-2018: interim professorships, Universität Duisburg-Essen and Greifswald University 

2018: offer for professorship of Language Use and Migration, Europa-Universität Viadrina (declined) 

2018-2024: Chair of English Linguistics, Greifswald University 

2018-2024: Co-Chair, Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für Geschlechterforschung, Greifswald University 

2022-2022: Dean of Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Greifswald University 

2022-2024: Dean, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Greifswald University 

Since 2024: Chair of English Linguistics, Heidelberg University

Current and Recent Research Projects

Cringe: Ästhetik und diskursive Praxis der Schamlust. Since 2024, with Heide Volkening, Universität Greifswald. Funded by Volkswagen Stiftung.

Unthinking Language. Paths towards Posthumanist Understandings of Human Interaction. Since 2021, with Britta Schneider, Europa-Universität Viadrina. Conference funding by the DFG.

Team Heyd

Team Heyd

Publications

Books

  • Saraceni, Mario, Britta Schneider and Theresa Heyd. 2021 (eds.). World Englishes: Paradigms. London: Bloomsbury.
  • Heyd, Theresa, Ferdinand von Mengden, Britta Schneider (eds.). 2019. The Sociolinguistic Economy of Berlin. Language and Social Life 16. Berlin: de Gruyter.
  • Heyd, Theresa. 2008. Email Hoaxes: Form, Function, Genre Ecology. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 174. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Special Issues

  • Schneider, Britta and Theresa Heyd (eds.) Posthumanist Sociolinguistics. Special Issue Signs And Society 12(1).
  • Heyd, Theresa and Britta Schneider (eds.). 2019. The Sociolinguistics of Late Modern Publics (Theme Issue). Journal of Sociolinguistics 23(5).

Journal Articles

  • Heyd, Theresa. 2022. Enregistering Lisa: Mediated tropes of linguistic mobility. Language & Communication.
  • Heyd, Theresa. 2021. Tertiary Orality? New Approaches to Spoken CMC. Anglistik 32(2), 131-147.
  • Heyd, Theresa and Alexandra Karnatz. 2020. “Handstyle as social meaning: graphic variation, graffiti and gender.” Ampersand.

    https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amper.2020.100063

  • Heyd, Theresa. 2017. “Phonetische Transkription als folklinguistische Zeichenpraxis im öffentlichen Raum.” Zeitschrift für Semiotik 38(1).
  • Heyd, Theresa and Cornelius Puschmann. 2017. “Hashtagging and functional shift: adaptation and appropriation of the #.” Journal of Pragmatics 116: 51-63.
  • Heyd, Theresa. 2016. “Narratives of belonging in the digital diaspora: Corpus approaches to a cultural concept.” Open Linguistics 2(1): 287-299.
  • Heyd, Theresa. 2015. “The metacommunicative lexicon of Nigerian Pidgin.” World Englishes 34(4): 669-687.
  • Heyd, Theresa and Mirka Honkanen. 2015. “From Naija to Chitown: The New African Diaspora and digital representations of place.” Discourse, Context & Media 9: 14-23.
  • Heyd, Theresa. 2014. “Folk-linguistic landscapes: The visual semiotics of digital enregisterment.” Language in Society 43(5): 489-514.
  • Heyd, Theresa. 2014. “Dude, Alter! A tale of two vocatives.” Pragmatics and Society 5(2): 271-295.
  • Heyd, Theresa. 2014. “Doing race and ethnicity in a digital community: Lexical labels and narratives of belonging in a Nigerian web forum.” Discourse, Context & Media 4/5: 38-47.
  • Heyd, Theresa. 2011. “Unreliability: the pragmatic perspective revisited.” Journal of Literary Theory5(1): 3-17.
  • Heyd, Theresa. 2010. “How you guys doin’? Staged orality and emerging plural address in the television series Friends.” American Speech 85(1): 33-66.
  • Heyd, Theresa. 2006. “Understanding and handling unreliable narratives: a pragmatic model and method.” Semiotica 162: 217-243.

Book Chapters

  • Heyd, Theresa. 2023. “New Fieldwork and Digital Ethnography.” In Michael Westphal, Guyanne Wilson (eds.) New Englishes, New Methods. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Heyd, Theresa and Marius Eckert. 2021. “Craft beer and linguistic life-style emblematization.” In Susanne Mühleisen and Sofia Rüdiger (eds.), Talking about Food – The Social and the Global in Eating Communities. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Heyd, Theresa and Britta Schneider. 2019. “Anglophone Practices in Berlin: From Historical Evidence to Transnational Communities.” In Raymond Hickey (ed.), English in the German-Speaking World. Cambridge: CUP. 143-164.
  • Heyd, Theresa. 2016. “Global varieties of English gone digital: Orthographic and semantic variation in digital Nigerian Pidgin.” In Lauren Squires (ed.), English in Computer-Mediated Communication: Variation, Representation, and Meaning. TiEL 93. Berlin: de Gruyter. 101-122.
  • Heyd, Theresa and Christian Mair. 2014. “From vernacular to digital ethnolinguistic repertoire: The case of Nigerian Pidgin.” In Lacoste, Véronique, Jakob R. E. Leimgruber and Thiemo Breyer (eds.), Indexing Authenticity: Perspectives from linguistics and anthropology. Berlin: de Gruyter. 242-266.
  • Puschmann, Cornelius and Theresa Heyd. 2012. “#narrative: Formen des persönlichen Erzählens bei Twitter.” In Ansgar Nünning, Rebecca Hagelmoser und Jonas Ivo Meyer (eds.), Narrative Genres im Internet: Theoretische Bezugsrahmen, Mediengattungstypologie und Funktionen. Handbücher zur Medien- und Kulturwissenschaft. Trier: WVT. 171-191.
  • Heyd, Theresa. 2012. “Zur Genreökologie der digitalen Folklore: Entwicklung, Funktion, narrative Dimension.” In Ansgar Nünning, Rebecca Hagelmoser and Jonas Ivo Meyer (eds.), Narrative Genres im Internet: Theoretische Bezugsrahmen, Mediengattungstypologie und Funktionen. Handbücher zur Medien- und Kulturwissenschaft. Trier: WVT. 333-350.
  • Heyd, Theresa. 2012. “The folk pragmatics of hoaxing: tracking a genre label from Edgar Allan Poe to Web 2.0.” In Ulrich Busse and Axel Hübler (eds.), The Meta-communicative Lexicon of English Now and Then: A Historical Pragmatics Approach. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 129-149.
  • Heyd, Theresa. 2010. “I know you guys hate forwards...: plural address terms in digital folklore.” In Heidrun Dorgeloh and Anja Wanner (eds.), Syntactic Variation and Genre. Topics in English Linguistics 70. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 331-356.
  • Heyd, Theresa. 2009. “A model for describing ‘new’ and ‘old’ properties of CMC genres: the case of Digital Folklore.” In Dieter Stein and Janet Giltrow (eds.), Genres in the Internet. Issues in the theory of genre. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 188. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 239-262.

Handbook Chapters

  • Heyd, Theresa and Morana Lukac. 2023. “Grassroots Prescriptivism.” In Robin Straajer et al. (eds.), The Handbook of Linguistic Prescriptivism. London: Routledge.
  • Heyd, Theresa. 2020. „Pidgins and creoles: new domains, new technologies.“ In Umberto Ansaldo and Miriam Meyerhoff (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Languages. London: Routledge.
  • Heyd, Theresa. 2017. “Blogs.” In Wolfram Bublitz and Christian Hoffmann (eds.), Pragmatics of Social Media. de Gruyter Handbooks of Pragmatics 11. Berlin: de Gruyter.
  • Heyd, Theresa. 2015. “CMC genres and processes of remediation.” In Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Tereza Spiloti (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Digital Communication. London: Routledge. 87-102.
  • Heyd, Theresa. 2013. “Deception in computer-mediated communication: the case of email hoaxes.” In Susan Herring, Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen (eds.), The Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication. Mouton Handbooks of Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 387-409.
  • Heyd, Theresa. 2012. “English and the Media: Internet.” In Alexander Bergs and Laurel Brinton (eds.), Historical Linguistics of English: An International Handbook. Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 1105-1118.

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