Ruth Wodak

Ruth Wodak is Distinguished Professor and Chair in Discourse Studies at Lancaster University. She moved from Vienna, Austria, where she was full professor of Applied Linguistics since 1991. She has stayed co-director of the Austrian National Focal Point (NFP) of the European Monitoring Centre for Racism, Xenophobia and Anti Semitism.

Besides various other prizes, she was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize for Elite Researchers in 1996. Her main projects focussed on "Discourses on Un/employment in EU organizations; Debates on NATO and Neutrality in Austria and Hungary; The Discursive Construction of European Identities; Attitudes towards EU-Enlargement; Racism at the Top. Parliamentary Debates on Immigration in Six EU countries; The Discursive Construction of the Past - Individual and Collective Memories of the German Wehrmacht and the Second World War." In October 2006, she was awarded the Woman's Prize of the City of Vienna.

Her research is mainly located in Discourse Studies (DS) and in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Together with her former colleagues and Ph.D students in Vienna (Rudolf de Cillia, Gertraud Benke, Helmut Gruber, Florian Menz, Martin Reisigl, Usama Suleiman, Christine Anthonissen), she elaborated the Discourse Historical Approach in CDA" (DHA) which is interdisciplinary, problem-oriented, and analyzes the change of discursive practices over time and in various genres.

She is member of the editorial board of a range of linguistic journals, co-editor of the journal Discourse and Society and editor of Critical Discourse Studies (with Norman Fairclough, Phil Graham and Jay Lemke) and of the Journal of Language and Politics (with Paul Chilton). Together with Greg Myers, she edits the book series DAPSAC (Benjamins). She was also section editor of "Language and Politics" for the Second Edition of the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Ruth chaired the Humanities and Social Sciences Panel for the EURYI award, in the European Science Foundation, 2006 - 2008.

She has held visiting professorships in Uppsala, Stanford University, University of Minnesota and Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. In the spring 2004, she had a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. Recently, she was awarded the Kerstin Hesselgren Chair of the Swedish Parliament and will be staying at University of Örebro, Sweden, from March to June 2008.

She has co-authored works with Teun A. van Dijk.