Prof. Anna Bonifazi holds a Professorship in Discourse Studies at the Department of Linguistics, University of Cologne. Her research spans Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Cognitive Linguistics, and Multimodal Communication with a focus on Ancient Greek Linguistics and Oral Epic traditions. She investigates phenomena like anaphoric cohesion in long texts, multimodal storytelling in film and oral traditions, and ancient Greek particles' discursive functions. Her work explores how multimodal elements (e.g., visual, musical, gestural) interact in communication, particularly analyzing films (e.g., mystery genres), ancient texts (e.g., Homeric epics), and South Slavic oral narratives. She examines cross-modal iconicity, viewpoint blending, and the cognitive underpinnings of discourse structures. Recent publications address topics like anaphoric strategies in crime stories and syntactic patterns in ancient Greek conversational frameworks. Prof. Bonifazi's research often bridges classical philology and modern cognitive theories, emphasizing embodied cognition and the interplay between language and other semiotic systems. She collaborates internationally on projects involving gesture analysis in storytelling and ancient papyrological studies. Her interdisciplinary work integrates linguistics with musicology, film studies, and cognitive science. Administratively, she oversees the Discourse Studies research group at Cologne and mentors assistants like Dr. Sandra Debreslioska and Madeleine Frings. Her lab focuses on multimodal discourse analysis using experimental and corpus-based methods.
