Melani Schroeter

Professor Melani Schroeter is a faculty member in the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Reading, where she holds the academic rank of Professor in German Studies and serves as Head of Department. She teaches and supervises across German linguistics, discourse studies, and applied linguistics, contributing significantly to both undergraduate and postgraduate education.

• MA German, English & History, University of Leipzig, Germany
• PhD German Linguistics, University of Leipzig, Germany
• PG Certificate in Academic Practice, University of Reading

Her research centers on political discourse analysis, discourse semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics, with a strong emphasis on silence, absence, metadiscourse, and language ideologies. She employs corpus-assisted methodologies to analyze public and political communication across historical and contemporary contexts. Her work explores how silence functions as a communicative strategy and how debates about language reflect broader societal norms.

Her recent publications span topics such as silence in political discourse, the evolution of 'voice' in parliamentary debates, far-right rhetoric in social media, and the cross-linguistic migration of German words into English. The articles demonstrate a consistent focus on discourse semantics, political communication, and ideological framing, often drawing on comparative and historical data from German and British contexts.

She has supervised numerous PhD and Master’s students in areas including translation studies, political discourse, and sociolinguistics. Her academic service includes peer review, organizing academic events, and presenting her research internationally. She is involved in multiple research centers, including the Network for Silence Studies, the Forum for Germanic Language Studies, and the Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism.