S.L. Atwater

Sara Atwater is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and a member of the LIMES project which focuses on the study of borders and border regions in Europe. Her research looks at the interplay between language, gender and regional events and social practices (carnival and cabaret) in the former mining region of Dutch Limburg and the Ruhr area of Germany. She is supervised by Leonie Cornips, Louis van den Hengel and Evelyn Ziegler (Universität Duisburg-Essen).

Expertise

Multilingualism in secondary school education, language and collective memory in regional events, humour in the language classroom, humour in regional events and festivals, language and gender socialisation

Career History

Sara has a BA in English and German Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and an MPhil in Education from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. She undertook secondary school teacher training (PGCE) at the University of London, Goldsmiths College and has taught in multilingual school settings in the UK, Austria and Belgium. Her master’s thesis and PGCE action research project looked at children’s language and humour development in multilingual settings.