From Birmingham to Erlangen

As a Humboldt Professor at FAU, Michaela Mahlberg sifts through huge text corpora to discover patterns that show what moves people. Environmental issues, for example.

Michaela Mahlberg really wanted to become a teacher. While studying mathematics at the University of Bonn, she learned programming and came into contact with corpus linguistics in English, and that was when she realized the potential of this combination of subjects and decided to go into academia. “Analyzing a language and recognizing patterns as a means to understand politics, society and history – it’s fascinating,” explains the linguist and mathematician.

Mahlberg has conducted research at universities in Italy and the UK. In 2013 she was appointed to a professorship at the University of Nottingham, and moved to the University of Birmingham in 2015, where she was appointed the Director of the Centre for Corpus Linguistics. As a Humboldt Professor at FAU, Michaela Mahlberg is in charge of the Department of Digital Humanities and Social Studies, founded in 2021. “FAU allows me to play an active part in developing new structures for cutting-edge research,” she explains.

When assessing texts, Mahlberg focuses on a number of topics, from children’s literature to social media. Her research is currently focusing on the water crisis, a project that started out as a pilot study in Birmingham. As she is convinced that “the major problems facing humanity always also have a language dimension,” she is investigating how we can raise awareness of water scarcity and the importance of protecting resources among broad sections of the population. She analyzes newspapers, UN reports, and works of literature in order to understand what importance is accorded to water. This can then be used, for example, to derive communication strategies.

Originally from the Rhineland, Michaela Mahlberg has chosen to settle in Erlangen, where language also has an important role to play in her free time: She interviews experts on current topics for her podcast. New episodes of “Life and Language” have already been recorded in FAU’s podcast studio.

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Author: Susanne Stemmler

This article is part of the FAU magazine

Innovation, diversity and passion: Those are the three guiding principles of our FAU, as stated in our mission statement. At FAU, we live these guiding principles every day in all that we do – in research, in teaching and when it comes to sharing the knowledge created at our university with society.

This, the second issue of our FAU magazine, underlines all of the above: It shows researchers who tirelessly keep pushing the boundaries of what has been believed to be possible. It introduces students who work together to achieve outstanding results for their FAU, talks about teaching staff who pass on their knowledge with infectious enthusiasm and creativity. And it reports back on members of staff with foresight and a talent for getting to the crux of the matter who are dedicated to improving the (research) infrastructure at FAU as well as people in key positions who are there for their university and are committed to its research location.