Manuela Wagner

Associate Dean for Humanities, Faculty Inclusion and Success

Professor, German Studies and Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies

Manuela Wagner holds an M.A in English studies and Marketing and a Ph.D. in English Studies with a specialization in linguistics from Graz University, Austria. During her graduate studies she spent 2 years in the baby lab of Psychophysics in the Department of Neurophysiology at the Max-Planck-Institute for BrainResearch in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. She also spent 3 years in the Department of Human Development and Psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Manuela Wagner holds an M.A in English studies and Marketing and a Ph.D. in English Studies with a specialization in linguistics from Graz University, Austria. During her graduate studies she spent 2 years in the baby lab of Psychophysics in the Department of Neurophysiology at the Max-Planck-Institute for BrainResearch in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. She also spent 3 years in the Department of Human Development and Psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The co-authored book Teaching Intercultural Citizenship Across the Curriculum: The Role of Language Education appeared with ACTFL in 2019.

As she investigates the relationship between Human Rights Education, Education for Social Justice, and Education for Intercultural Citizenship, ongoing empirical and theoretical projects analyze the role of

• educators as advocates for all language learners through an approach that helps students reflect on and celebrate their plurilinguistic and pluricultural identities,
• nonverbal communication in intercultural communication,
• intellectual humility and conviction in Intercultural Competence and vice versa,
• ethics in teaching Intercultural Citizenship.

Together with Anke Finger, she edited the volume  Bias, Belief, and Conviction in an Age of Fake Facts (2022). Here she is interested in how education can facilitate students’ understanding of their own convictions in order to avoid possible negative consequences of blind convictions.

Manuela Wagner is also interested in humor research in a variety of contexts (humor and language education, humor in German-speaking cultures). She co-edited the volume Humor and Prosody (2013). Her research in first language acquisition ranges from pragmatic development in infants and children and language development First Steps to Communication: A Pragmatic Analysis, Narr, 2004 and in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.