Stefanie trained as a linguist and English language teacher at a number of institutions in three different countries. She conducted her undergraduate studies at the Ludwig Maximilian Universität München before moving to New Zealand to complete her BA(Hons) and MA degrees at the Victoria University of Wellington. Upon completion of her graduate studies, Stefanie undertook a Cambridge teaching certificate course at the International House Barcelona. In 2007 she graduated with a jointly awarded PhD degree, on the multimodal expression of (im)politeness, from the University of Auckland and the Universität Hamburg.

 

 

With a background in intercultural communication studies and cultural anthropology as well as linguistics, Stefanie has a longstanding professional interest in intercultural research. Her personal interest in the topic derives from her travels as well as from having lived and worked in a number of different cultural contexts for nearly a third of her life. She has given a range of conference and seminar presentations, both nationally and internationally and has published on aspects of intercultural communication, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and multimodality. In 2009, Stefanie will embark on a British Council funded collaborative research project on multimodality in China, where she will have the opportunity to put her intercultural competence to the test.