Principal Investigator

Nina-Kristin Meister (née Pendzich) received her PhD in German Linguistics from the Georg-August-University of Göttingen with a dissertation entitled “Lexical Nonmanuals in German Sign Language (DGS). An Empirical and Theoretical Investigation” (2018: Wilhelm von Humboldt-Preis German Linguistic Society (DGfS), 2017: Christian-Gottlob-Heyne-Preis Göttingen Graduate School of Humanities). Since 2017 she is the director of the Sign Language Lab at the Department of German Philology at the University of Göttingen and is involved in various research projects. Her research interests are in the field of theoretical and experimental sign language linguistics. She investigates the interfaces between gesture, emotion, and sign language, grammatical and lexical nonmanuals, narrative structures, various sentence types such as conditional sentences, and iconicity in sign languages. She has applied a variety of empirical methodologies and works with the Facial Action Coding System (FACS, Ekman et al. 2002, certified FACS-Coder). She is editing the first bimodal-bilingual book series in German Sign Language (DGS) and German ‘Deutsche Gebärdensprache und Deaf Communities’ (Buske Verlag, with Thomas Finkbeiner) and the journal ‘Linguistische Berichte’ (Buske Verlag, with Markus Steinbach).