Rate My Professor Britta Schneider

Britta Schneider, Univ.-Prof. Dr. Britta Schneider, PhD, is Professor of Applied Linguistics of Contemporary English in the Department of English and American Studies at the Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna, since February 2026. She earned her MA in English Studies, Latin American Studies, and Cultural Anthropology from Goethe University Frankfurt in 2004, with a thesis titled Linguistic Human Rights and Migrant Languages: A Comparative Analysis of Migrant Language Education in Great Britain and Germany. In November 2011/April 2012, she completed a binational PhD magna cum laude from Goethe University Frankfurt and Macquarie University Sydney on Language and Transnationalism: Language Discourse in Transnational Salsa Communities of Practice. Her Habilitation in July 2020 at European University Viadrina was entitled Liquid Languages: Post-national Acts of Identity and the Fluidity of Language Categories in Multilingual Belize. Earlier in her career, she served as research assistant and lecturer at Goethe University Frankfurt, lecturer for special tasks at University of Siegen (2005-2012) and Free University of Berlin (2013-2014), research assistant at Free University of Berlin (2014-2018), Junior Professor of Language Use and Migration at European University Viadrina (2018-2022), and full Professor of Language Use and Migration there (2022-2026).

Her research focuses on language ideologies, including how languages and social boundaries are co-constructed through discursive and material practices; multilingualism and linguistic diversity in digital society and AI cultures; language contact and entanglements in Anglophone postcolonial spaces such as Belize; posthumanist language studies exploring language, materiality, and technology; and language in transnational settings encompassing music, dance, literature, digital space, consumption, public space, policy, and gender. At the University of Vienna, she plans to establish the Critical AI Language and Literacy Lab to examine language models from a linguistic anthropological viewpoint and foster literacies for a democratic language culture amid AI advancements. Key publications include monographs Liquid Languages: Constructing Language in Late Modern Cultures of Diffusion (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Salsa, Language and Transnationalism (Multilingual Matters, 2014), and Linguistic Human Rights and Migrant Languages (Peter Lang, 2005). She has edited special issues such as Posthumanist Sociolinguistics (Signs and Society, 2024), The Sociolinguistics of Late Modern Publics (Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2021), Biases in Linguistics (Language Sciences, 2019), and Language Ideologies in Music (Language & Communication, 2017). Recent peer-reviewed articles address AI themes, including "Language is not a data set—Why overcoming ideologies of dataism is more important than ever in the age of AI" (Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2024) and "A sociolinguist's look at the 'language' in Large Language Models" (Critical AI, 2024).