After completing my M.A. in English, Russian and History at the University of Münster, I wrote a thesis on British, Polish and Russian apologies and received my PhD in linguistics from the University of Oldenburg. Before I joined the English Department at Surrey in 2010, I did a postdoc in the Department of Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, where I was working on a project on sharing responsibilities in different cultural settings.

As a linguist I have focused on subdisciplines of linguistics that deal with language use rather than structure, such as pragmatics, politeness theory, intercultural communication, sociolinguistics, conversation analysis and language contact. I am mainly interested in how factors such as language, culture and gender influence the way people communicate. Since culture- and gender-specific features of language use become most apparent through comparison, nearly all my work is contrastive.

Here is a programme I did for BBC Radio 3 (broadcast on 23/04/10 and 29/04/11) summarising some of my findings on apologies: 

Some recent publications

Ogiermann, Eva (2009) On Apologising in Negative and Positive Politeness Cultures. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

    Reviewed in:

    The Modern Language Journal 95: 328-329, by Lisa D. Dykstra
   Multilingua 30: 134-138, by Rachel L. Shively
   Languages in Contrast 11: 259-264, by Witosław Awedyk
   Language in Society 41: 143-144, by Zhen Zhang and Xiaoping Huang
   Journal of Sociolinguistics 16: 124-127, by J. César Félix-Brasdefer
   Journal of Pragmatics 44: 529-531, by Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka

Zinken, Jörg & Ogiermann, Eva (2011) How to propose an action as objectively necessary: The case of Polish trzeba x (“One needs to x”). Research on Language and Social Interaction 44(3): 263-287.

Ogiermann, Eva & Suszczyńska Małgorzata (2011) “On (im)politeness behind the Iron Curtain” In F. Bargiela and D. Kádár (eds) Politeness across Cultures. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 211-229.

Callies, Marcus, Ogiermann, Eva & Szcześniak, Konrad (2010) “Genusschwankung bei der Integration von englischen Lehnwörtern im Deutschen und Polnischen“. In C. Scherer and A. Holler (eds) Strategien der Integration und Isolation nicht-nativer Einheiten und Strukturen. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter: 65-86.

Ogiermann, Eva (2009) Politeness and in-directness across cultures: A comparison of English, German, Polish and Russian requests. Journal of Politeness Research 5(2): 189-216.

Ogiermann, Eva (2008) On the culture-specificity of linguistic gender differences: The case of English and Russian apologies. Intercultural Pragmatics 5(3): 259–286.

Departmental Duties

Programme Director:    MA Intercultural Communication with International Business

                                        MA Communication and International Marketing

Admissions Officer, MA Programmes

External Work

Book reviews editor of the Journal of Pragmatics