Successful Dissertation Defenses in the CRC “Metaphors of Religion”

On Monday, April 13, 2026, Sebastian Reimann (Subproject C04) successfully defended his dissertation titled “Deliberate Metaphors in Religious Online Forums: Challenges and Possible Ways Towards their Automatic Detection.” His work examines how deliberately used metaphors in religious online forums can be identified and analyzed using computer-assisted methods. The focus is on both the specific challenges posed by such linguistic phenomena and methodological approaches for their automated detection. The dissertation was supervised by Prof. Dr. Tatjana Scheffler and Prof. Dr. Frederik Elwert.

The following day, April 14, 2026, Adam Roussel (subproject B01) also completed his doctoral studies with a successful defense. His dissertation is titled “Diachronic Sense Embeddings as a Resource for Metaphor Annotation in Historical Corpora.” In his work, he develops approaches for modeling historical shifts in word meaning and making them usable for annotating metaphorical language in older text corpora. In doing so, the dissertation makes an important contribution to the intersection of historical linguistics, digital corpus analysis, and metaphor research. The dissertation was supervised by Prof. Dr. Stefanie Dipper and Prof. Dr. Tatjana Scheffler.
The SFB extends its warmest congratulations to both doctoral graduates on their outstanding achievements and wishes them every success and all the best in their future academic and professional careers.