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 postdoctoral researcher in the Neurobiology of Language Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. During 2016 to 2019, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC-funded Project “Grammatical Universals” headed by Martin Haspelmath. Since obtaining her PhD degree in Leuven under the supervision of Dirk Geeraerts and Dirk Speelman, she has worked in Jena, Marburg and Louvain-la-Neuve. Her main interests are usage-based linguistics, functional typology and language variation. She is a fan of big corpora, programming and statistics and has recently published a textbook “How to Do Linguistics with R: Data exploration and statistical analysis” (2015).