Ruth Wodak is Emerita Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University, UK, and affiliated to the University of Vienna. Besides various other prizes, she was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize for Elite Researchers in 1996 and an Honorary Doctorate from University of Örebro in Sweden in 2010. She is past-President of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. 2011, she was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honour in Silver for Services to the Republic of Austria. She is member of the British Academy of Social Sciences and member of the Academia Europaea. 2008, she was awarded the Kerstin Hesselgren Chair of the Swedish Parliament (at University Örebrö).
She is member of the editorial board of a range of linguistic journals and co-editor of the journals Discourse and Society, Critical Discourse Studies, and Language and Politics. She has held visiting professorships in University of Uppsala, Stanford University, University Minnesota, University of East Anglia, and Georgetown University. In the spring 2014, Ruth held the Davis Chair for Interdisciplinary Studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC. In the spring 2016, Ruth was Distinguished Schuman Fellow at the Schuman Centre, EUI, Florence; 2017, she was the Willi Brandt Chair at the University of Malmö, Sweden.
Her research interests focus on discourse studies; language and/in politics; identity politics and politics of the past; right-wing populism and the far-right; antisemitism, racism and xenophobia; and on ethnographic methods of linguistic field work.
Ruth has published 10 monographs, 27 co-authored monographs, over 60 edited volumes and ca 400 peer reviewed journal papers and book chapters. Recent book publications include The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics (Routledge, 2018; co-edited with B. Forchtner); Kinder der Rückkehr. Geschichte einer marginalisierten Jugend (Springer, 2018; co-edited with E. Berger); The Politics of Fear. What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mean (Sage, 2015; translation into the German Politik mit der Angst. Zur Wirkung rechtspopulistischer Diskurse. Konturen, 2016); The discourse of politics in action: ‘Politics as Usual’ (Palgrave, revised edition (2011); Migration, Identity and Belonging (LUP, 2011; co-edited with G. Delanty, P. Jones); The Discursive Construction of History. Remembering the German Wehrmacht’s War of Annihilation (Palgrave, 2008; co-edited with H. Heer, W. Manoschek, A. Pollak); The Politics of Exclusion. Debating Migration in Austria (Transaction Press, 2009; with M. Krzyżanowski); The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics (Sage, 2010; co-edited with Barbara Johnstone and Paul Kerswill); Analyzing Fascist Discourse. Fascism in Talk and Text (Routledge, 2013; co-edited with John Richardson), and Rightwing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse (Bloomsbury, 2013; co-edited with Majid KhosraviNik and Brigitte Mral). See http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/profiles/Ruth-Wodak for more information on on-going research projects and recent publications.
Specialist research areas:
Antisemitism, racism and xenophobia; the Holocaust and Holocaust denial; radical right ideologies and rhetoric; counter-extremism and policy implications
Available for consultation in the following areas:
Rise of the radical right across Europe; expert witness reports and testimony; live / pre-recorded media interviews (including print, online, radio and television); and editorials
