On December, 3rd 2014, XPrag.de member Nicole Gotzner gave the opening talk of a new event series organized by XPrag.de associate Carla Umbach for the Center for the General Linguistics (ZAS) and the Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZFL) Berlin.
PhD candidates from ZAS and ZFL will meet regularly presenting their PhD-projects in a mutually intelligible way. It is a well-known fact that explaining ideas to an uninformed audience helps to bring a PhD thesis a big step forward. In return, the candidates will get feedback of non-experts that might broaden their own perspective.
Nicole was the ideal candidate to open the series: She has submitted her thesis but has not defended it yet – so she could share recent experiences. Following the maxim of Albert Einstein “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” Nicole presented her thesis very tangibly so that finally everybody got involved in the vivid follow-up discussion.
She definitely brought the series on the right track.
