Editorial Team

The editorial team currently consists of the editor-in-chief Ruth M. Mell (Technical University Darmstadt), the deputy editor-in-chief Rita Luppi (Università di Bologna), the editorial assistants Jihyeon Lee (Technische Universität Darmstadt), Martina Lemmetti (Università degli Studi di Pavia), Ramona Pellegrino (Università di Bologna), Andrea Spedale (Università degli Studi di Milano), the head of the section practical reports/project presentations Franziska Wallner (Herder-Institut der Universität Leipzig), the head of the section corpora Harald Lüngen (Leibniz Institute for the German Language), as well as the editors of the journal Carolina Flinz (Università degli Studi di Pavia) and Britta Hufeisen (Technische Universität Darmstadt).

Ruth Maria Mell is the project lead of the project PraxisPro, a DAAD-funded initiative for the internationalization of teacher education programs at the TU Darmstadt. Ruth M. Mell received her doctorate at the University of Mannheim for her research on the language of the 1968 student protests with a special focus on the concept of enlightenment. Until 2018, focus of her academic work at the Leibnitz-Institut for German Language in Mannheim was the analysis of political language (for example in the Weimar republic) as well as corpus-based lexicographic work on the use of expressions on the level of the lexicon. Her current research connects the areas of teacher education, didactics and applied linguistics with concepts of research on specialized language, cross-cultural issues and heterogeneity. 

Rita Luppi is Junior assistant professor of German Language and Linguistics at the University of Bologna. In 2020/21, she was a DAAD fellow at the Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache Mannheim; in 2024/25, she held a research fellowship at the TU Berlin and at the Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum für europäisch-jüdische Studien (MMZ) in Potsdam, funded by a Marco Polo scholarship from the University of Bologna. She has participated in various national and international research projects. In 2025 she published her first monograph Erzählen und Wiedererzählen. Analyse narrativer Rekonstruktion in mehrfachen Interviews mit deutschsprachigen Migrant:innen in Israel (Verlag für Gesprächsforschung). Her research interests mainly include Conversation Analysis, the investigation of the relationship between language and migration, corpus linguistics, and languages for special purposes.

Jihyeon Lee is a research assistant at the Department of Linguistics - Multilingualism at the Technical University of Darmstadt since 2024. Her research focuses on language(s) awareness in multilingual learners and the multidimensional assessment of metalinguistic abilities. In her current PhD project, she is empirically investigating the influence of previous language (learning) experiences on the development of language(s) awareness in early and late multilinguals.

Martina Lemmetti has been a research assistant in German linguistics at the University of Pavia since 2023. She earned her PhD from the University of Pisa in 2021 with a dissertation on German modal particles in interrogative clauses and their functional equivalents in Italian. From 2018 to 2020 she was a member of the International Doctoral Network (IPN) at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language in Mannheim. Her research interests include German–Italian contrastive studies on modal particles, their teaching and learning in school and university settings, and code-switching in texts associated with the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize as well as in university-level German as a Foreign Language contexts.

Ramona Pellegrino received her PhD at the University of Genoa for her research on metalinguistic reflections and multilingualism in transcultural German-language literature in 2017 (dissertation prize of the doctoral school). Since 2024 she has been a research fellow at the University of Bologna for a project on gender-inclusive language in university communication. She is a member of the scientific board of the Inter-University Research Centre POLYPHONIE. Her research interests focus on written and oral corpora, language biographies, the linguistic analysis of the relationship between language and migration, and forms of literary multilingualism in contemporary German-language literature.

Andrea Spedale started his PhD in German linguistics at the University of Milan in October 2023 after completing his bachelor's degree in Language Mediation and Intercultural Comunication (2020) and his master's degree in Languages and Cultures for International Communication and Cooperation (2023) from the same university. During his master's studies, he was actively involved in the European network “German and Contrastive Linguistics” (GerCoLiNet), supported by the 4EU+ Alliance. As part of his doctoral research, he is undertaking research stays in 2024/25 at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim and at the University of Zurich. His dissertation explores multi-word units in German discourse on nuclear energy. His research interests include discourse linguistics, corpus linguistics, morphology, and phraseology.

Harald Lüngen has been a research assistant at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language since 2011, where he is responsible for the German reference corpus DeReKo. Harald studied computational linguistics, general linguistics, English and mathematics at the universities of Heidelberg and Bielefeld. He received his doctorate in Linguistics from Bielefeld University in 2002 for his thesis on a hierarchical morphology model for lexical acquisition from the Verbmobil corpus. From 2000 until 2002, he worked as a project manager at Lingsoft Oy in Helsinki and from 2022 until 2011 as a research assistant in the DFG research group Text Technology and in the Centre for Media and Interactivity at Justus Liebig University in Giessen.

Franziska Wallner is Professor for Linguistics of German as a second language and German as a foreign language at the TU Dortmund. Her research focuses on corpus-based studies of German as a first, second and foreign language, considering both written and oral text types and genres. Her overarching aim is to identify language-related challenges and phenomena relevant to teaching on an empirical basis. She completed her doctorate on collocations in academic languages in 2012 and was habilitated in 2024 with a thesis on cross-disciplinary lexis in educational contexts.