Florence Oloff

Florence Oloff is a Professor for German Linguistics and Multimodal Interaction at the University of Mannheim and a Researcher in the Department of Pragmatics at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language. She leads significant research projects including 'Navigating the digital everyday life: Elderly participants' use of mundane technologies in and for social interaction (DigiLife)' (2022-2026) and 'Smart Communication: The situated practices of mobile technology and digital literacies' (2019-2023).

Her primary research interests center on conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, and multimodal analysis of embodied resources in social interaction. She investigates technology use in face-to-face communication, response particles and responsive actions, cross-linguistic comparison, and multilingual encounters. Her work bridges linguistic theory with practical applications in understanding how people interact with digital technologies in everyday contexts.

Her recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on smartphone use in social interaction, multimodal analysis of technology-mediated communication, and cross-linguistic studies of conversational structures. She has published extensively in leading journals and edited volumes, with a particular emphasis on how digital technologies reshape social interaction across different contexts and age groups.

As an active member of the academic community, she serves on the board of Gesprächsforschung eV, is part of the DFG network on Interactional Linguistics, and contributes to the scientific board of the transnational graduate school LOGOS. She also serves on the editorial board of the journal Slovo a Slovesnost.

Professor Oloff actively supervises doctoral students, including Iuliia Avgustis (who defended her dissertation on smartphone use by young adults in August 2024), Tianyi Bai, Helena Budde, and Ivana Leinonen, demonstrating her commitment to mentoring the next generation of scholars in interactional linguistics and multimodal analysis.