Keynote speakers

Originally from Belgium, Dr. Divjak completed her Undergraduate and Postgraduate training in Slavonic Philology at the KULeuven, Belgium. She also holds a Degree in Teaching Modern Foreign Languages from the same institution. After she had spent a year in Poland specializing in Polish Language and Culture (UJ Krakow, Poland), she returned to Alma Mater to teach Russian at the Undergraduate level. She embarked on a PhD in linguistics, funded by the Research Council (FWO Flanders), in 2000.

After obtaining her PhD in 2004, she spent one year at the UNC at Chapel Hill (USA, 2004-2005) as a BAEF Francqui Fellow and one year at the University of Stockholm (Sweden, 2005-2006) as a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation (FWO Flanders). 

Dr. Divjak joined the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Sheffield (UK) in September 2006 as a Lecturer in Slavonic Languages and Linguistics and was promoted to Chair in 2018. She has held a wide range of administrative and leadership roles. Notably, as Director of Russian & Polish she leads and revamped UG language programs in Russian and Polish and as Director of the Centre for Linguistic Research she leads on the establishment of the HumLab, an experimental facility for interdisciplinary research in Arts & Humanities. 

In January 2019, Dr. Divjak joined the University of Birmingham as Professorial Research Fellow and is working with the Out of our Minds team to understand language and make language learning a more natural and rewarding experience. 

Dr. Levshina is a linguist working as an assistant professor of communication and computational methods at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Before starting this job in 2023, she worked at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen in the large consortium “Language in Interaction”. Her main research interests are cognitive and functional linguistics, pragmatics, typology, corpora and data analysis. She obtained her PhD at KU Leuven in 2011 and got her habilitation qualification at Leipzig University in 2019 with a thesis “Towards a theory of communicative efficiency”. In addition to papers on causatives, differential case marking, politeness, word order variation and other linguistic topics, Natalia is the author of a best-selling statistical manual “How to Do Linguistics with R” (Benjamins, 2015). More recently, she published her second book “Communicative Efficiency: Language Structure and Use” (Cambridge University Press, 2022) about how the pressure for saving time and effort shapes human languages.