Steering Committee

Meet the YUFE Multilingualism Team!

LingYUFE brings together a diverse group of leading scholars from across the YUFE alliance, representing academic partner universities in France, Germany, Finland, Belgium, and the UK, to explore the complexities of language in a modern, interconnected world.

Alessandro Basile

Sorbonne Nouvelle University

Alessandro Basile is an Associate Professor of English Linguistics at Sorbonne Nouvelle University. His research interests include language variation and change, modality, postcolonial varieties of English and language contact. He has also recently been working on grammaticalization and constructional change. His teaching mainly focuses on sociolinguistics, semantics and pragmatics. He is the coordinating PI of the MultilingYUFE Project.

Aliyah Morgenstern

Sorbonne Nouvelle University

Aliyah Morgenstern is a Professor of Linguistics at Sorbonne Nouvelle University and Vice-Rector for European Affairs. She teaches in the Department of English. Her research focuses on early language acquisition—mono-, multilingual, and multimodal—examining gesture, family interaction, corpus development, and digital humanities. She conducts this work within extensive international research collaborations.

Mikko Laitinen

University of Eastern Finland

Mikko Laitinen is a Professor of English at the University of Eastern Finland and an elected member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters. His research focuses on language change in digital social networks, and he is the PI of “Weak-tie Hypothesis in Complex Digital Networks” (COMET), which is funded by the Research Council of Finland for 2024-28, and one of the leaders in the national research infrastructure for digital humanities (FIN-CLARIAH).

Rafael García Pérez

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Rafael García Pérez is an Associate Professor of Spanish Language at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. One of his main lines of research focuses on the History of the Spanish Language and Lexicology, with particular attention to syntactic–semantic relationships and historical lexicography. A second line of research centers on Comparative Linguistics from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, as well as on translation and Discourse Analysis. He teaches courses related to grammar, dialectology, and sociolinguistics.

Astrid De Wit

University of Antwerp

Astrid De Wit is an Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Antwerp. Her main research areas involve tense and aspect constructions across languages and cognitive (socio-)linguistics. She teaches courses on grammar, methods in linguistic and sociolinguistics.

Picture: Yana Lozeva

Christina Gkonou

University of Essex

Christina Gkonou is an Associate Professor of TESOL and Applied Linguistics at the University of Essex. Her research interests are in language teacher emotions, identity, wellbeing, and the psychology of language learning. She has published extensively in this area. She is currently co-editor of the Multilingual Matters book series on the Psychology of Language Learning and Teaching.

Mieke Vandenbroucke

University of Antwerp

Mieke Vandenbroucke is an Associate Research Professor at University of Antwerp, where is also the Spokesperson of the research group Grammar and Pragmatics. In 2026, she becomes the Secretary General of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA). Her research interests are societal multilingualism, migration-related institutional interactions and government communication.

Marcus Callies

University of Bremen

Marcus Callies is Full Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Bremen, Germany. His main research interests are lexico-grammatical innovation and variation in L1 and L2 varieties of English, World Englishes at the nexus of language, culture and cognition, linguistics and teacher education, the language of football, and Learner Corpus Research.

Monika Boruta

Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń

Dr Monika Boruta is a linguist working in the fields of gesture studies, child language development, and sign languages. Since 2013, she has been a member of the Centre for Language Evolution Studies (CLES, cles.umk.pl), where she has collaborated with an international audience. Currently, as the Principal Investigator of an NCN grant, she continues her research on early gestures in young children, aiming to demonstrate that gestures are an important indicator of the acquisition of communicative abilities in childhood. Professionally, she is affiliated with Nicolaus Copernicus University, where she works in the Department of Experimental Linguistics.