Maïa Ponsonnet is an Adjunct Research Fellow in the Linguistics discipline within the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia. She obtained her PhD in Linguistics from The Australian National University in 2013. After completing her doctorate, she held a two-year postdoctoral position at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) from 2014 to 2015. In 2016, she was awarded an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellowship, which facilitated her appointment as Senior Lecturer at UWA. She now holds an adjunct role at UWA while serving as Chargé de Recherche de Classe Normale (CRCN) with Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) at the Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage (DDL), CNRS, in Lyon, France, where she coordinates the DiLiS research axis on linguistic diversity and its sources.

Ponsonnet's research centers on anthropological linguistics, particularly the semantics of emotions, expressivity, and internal states across languages, with long-term fieldwork among First Nations communities in Arnhem Land. She has documented endangered Gunwinyguan languages like Dalabon via an Endangered Languages Documentation Programme project and examined emotion expression in the shift from traditional languages to Kriol. Her major publications include the monograph Difference and Repetition in Language Shift to a Creole: The Expression of Emotions (John Benjamins, 2019), the article The Linguistic Embodiment of Emotions: A Study of the Australian Continent (Ethos, 2022), and Emotional Language: A Brief History of Recent Research (2022). Additional contributions feature chapters on sustainable linguistics, country and language in literature, generic terms for subsections in Australia, and event plurality in Kriol, alongside articles on Dalabon grammar and pragmatic functions. Her work elucidates universal patterns and cultural specificities in emotion lexicons, advancing language documentation, typology, and revitalization. Ponsonnet co-edits volumes on language contact and variation, participates in workshops, and engages in public outreach through seminars and lectures.

Professional Email: maia.ponsonnet@uwa.edu.au