Series
Leiden-Birmingham Lectures
Leiden and Birmingham host leading experts in iconicity, language emergence, descriptive linguistics, sign languages and gesture, and historical linguistics. By bringing them together, we join forces and collaborate in academic endeavors geared toward new ideas and grant proposals. In addition, this collaboration enhances the training of junior scholars by developing skills beyond the expertise of their home institutions.
To tackle the lasting challenge of limited accessible resources for deaf learners in sign language studies, a permanent record of this collaboration will be published online in the form of the Leiden-Birmingham Lecture Series. The bilingual (English-International Sign) lectures will be available globally, benefiting deaf and hearing academics.
The primary objective of the series is to present ongoing research in both institutions under three general themes:
In 2024, a team of researchers from Birmingham working on iconicity, language emergence, sign languages and gestures visited LUCL. We hosted a day of talks on Comparative Cross-Modal Linguistics, followed by a day with brainstorm sessions, with researchers from both universities and PhD students.
In 2025, Victoria Nyst (LU) and Gerardo Ortega (UoB) received funding to realize the second leg of this collaboration, whereby Leiden scholars will be visiting “Brum”. This time the theme of the lectures will be Language Emergence and Evolution. In July 2025, the two universities will collaborate in the School for Digital Deaf Studies (taught in International Sign) that consists of one week in Ghana and one week online.
A final visit is scheduled for February/March 2026.
The lectures will be recorded and published online, in an effort to jointly work towards an open library of bilingual lectures on cross-modal linguistics.