Professor Dagmar Divjak, Professorial Research Fellow in Cognitive Linguistics and Language Cognition at the University of Birmingham, has been elected as an as *Ordinary Member of Academia Europaea* of the Section of Linguistic Studies due to her outstanding achievements as a researcher.
The election of Dagmar Divjak took place on the recommendation of the Academic Section for Linguistics and following peer review by the relevant Class Committee of the Academia Europaea, comprised of academics from all over Europe.
Founded in 1988, the Academia Europaea was created to champion the advancement and propagation of excellence in scholarship in the humanities, law, the economic, social, and political sciences, mathematics, medicine, and all branches of natural and technological sciences. The aim of the Academy is to promote European research, advise governments and international organisations in scientific matters, and further interdisciplinary and international research.
The Linguistics section currently has 166 members and each year about a dozen new members are elected on to the committee.
Commenting on her election Professor Dagmar Divjak said: "I’m greatly honoured, and genuinely humbled, to have been elected a member of the Academia Europaea in recognition of my research achievements. I will contribute enthusiastically to its mission of promoting European research, and furthering interdisciplinary and international research."
Originally from Belgium, Dagmar Divjak completed her Undergraduate and Postgraduate training in Slavonic Philology at the KULeuven, Belgium. She also holds a Degree in Teaching Modern Foreign Languages from the same institution. After obtaining her PhD in 2004, she 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).
In 2006 she joined the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Sheffield as a Lecturer in Slavonic Languages and Linguistics and was promoted to Chair in 2018. In January 2019 Dagmar joined the University of Birmingham as Professorial Research Fellow and currently is working with the Out of our Minds team to understand language and make language learning a more natural and rewarding experience.