Professor Dagmar Divjak

Professor Dagmar Divjak

Department of Modern Languages
Professorial Research Fellow in Cognitive Linguistics and Language Cognition

Contact details

My main research interest is in understanding how our cognitive capacities give rise to the patterns we see in language and how language learners might use these patterns to build up knowledge of their language. I work with the  team to understand language knowledge and optimize language learning and am Editor-in-Chief of the journal Cognitive Linguistics.

Qualifications

  • BA (KULeuven, Belgium), 1995
  • MA (KULeuven, Belgium), 1997
  • Academic Teacher Training (KULeuven, Belgium), 1997
  • Specialization in Polish Language and Culture (UJ Krakow, Poland), 1998
  • PhD (KULeuven, Belgium), 2004

Biography

Originally from Belgium, I completed my Undergraduate and Postgraduate training in Slavonic Philology at the KULeuven, Belgium. I also hold a Degree in Teaching Modern Foreign Languages from the same institution. After I had spent a year in Poland specializing in Polish Language and Culture (UJ Krakow, Poland), I returned to my Alma Mater to teach Russian at the Undergraduate level. Frustrated by the inadequacy of the grammatical descriptions I could offer my students, I embarked on a PhD in linguistics, funded by the Research Council (FWO Flanders), in 2000.

After obtaining my PhD in 2004, I spent one year at the UNC at Chapel Hill (USA, 2004-2005) as a BAEF Francqui Fellow and one year at the University of Stockholm (Sweden, 2005-2006) as a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation (FWO Flanders).聽

I joined the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Sheffield (UK) in September 2006 as a Lecturer in Slavonic Languages and Linguistics and was promoted to Chair in 2018. I have held a wide range of administrative and leadership roles. Notably, as Director of Russian & Polish I lead and revamped UG language programs in Russian and Polish and as Director of the Centre for Linguistic Research I lead on the establishment of the聽HumLab, an experimental facility for interdisciplinary research in Arts & Humanities.聽

In January 2019 I joined the University 麻豆精选 as Professorial Research Fellow and am working with the Out of our Minds team to understand language and make language learning a more natural and rewarding experience. In 2020 I was elected a member of the Academia Europaea (MAE).

Publications

Recent publications

Article

Sun, H, Divjak, D & Milin, P 2025, '', Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, vol. 4, no. 1, 100176.

Divjak, D, Milin, P & Borowski, M 2025, '', Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.

He, S, Divjak, D & Milin, P 2025, '', Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism.

Grose-Hodge, M, Dabrowska, E & Divjak, D 2024, '', Journal of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 328-356.

Sun, H, 膶olovi膰, P, Milin, P & Divjak, D 2024, '', Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development.

Divjak, D, Testini, I & Milin, P 2024, '', Journal of Morphology.

Romain, L, Milin, P & Divjak, D 2024, '', Language Learning.

Divjak, D, Sun, H & Milin, P 2024, '', Journal of Neurolinguistics, vol. 69, 101177.

Romain, L, Hanzlikova, D, Milin, P & Divjak, D 2024, '', Constructions and Frames, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 1-29.

Romain, L & Divjak, D 2024, '', Pedagogical Linguistics.

Milin, P & Divjak, D 2024, '', Cognitive Psychology Bulletin, vol. 1, no. 9, pp. 7-15.

Milin, P, Tucker, BV & Divjak, D 2023, '', Language and Cognition.

Ez-zizi, A, Divjak, D & Milin, P 2023, '', Language Learning, vol. 74, no. 1.

Divjak, D, Romain, L & Milin, P 2023, '', Linguistics.

Preprint

Madabushi, HT, Romain, L, Milin, P & Divjak, D 2023 '' arXiv.