This is me.

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Information Studies at the University of Groningen, Netherlands.

I am a #multimodalist with a multi-faceted background in linguistics, semiotics, and discourse analysis and have about 15 years of experience in working with visual and audiovisual communication. In my work, I deal with a broad variety of communicative artefacts with expertise in films and audiovisual data, comics, social media and games. I have contributed to the theoretical and methodological development of multimodality studies and also work in corpus-analytical and empirically oriented projects. At the moment, I focus on the question of how (audio-)visual communication can help building a better future for our society.

At the University of Groningen, I teach classes on multimodality, digital communication, visual and audio-visual analysis and work as programme coordinator of the Master program Communication and Information Studies.

I am the Chief Editor of the journal 'Visual Communication', one of the key journals in the field of visual and multimodal communication, and Associate Editor for the speciality section 'Multimodality of Communication' with Frontiers in Communication.

My publications include a monograph entitled Film Discourse Interpretation: Towards a New Paradigm for Multimodal Film Analysis, published in 2014 with Routledge, the textbooks Multimodality from 2017 and Multimodalität from 2020, several edited collections, as well as several contributions and papers on the analysis of multimodal artefacts such as film, comics, social media, etc.

The best way to contact me is by writing an email.

This is what I'm currently working on.

Recent Publication

Book Review: Wildfeuer, Janina (2023): S. Cowling, W.D. Cray (2022). Philosophy of Comics. An Introduction. Bloomsbury Academic, 978-1-3500-9844-2. Online here

Ravelli, Louise & Wildfeuer, Janina (2023): "Editorial: Celebrating 20 Years of Visual Communication". Visual Communication 20,1. Special Issue.

Recent Book

Pflaeging, Jana; Wildfeuer, Janina; Bateman, John A. (eds.) (2021): Empirical Multimodality Research: Methods, Evaluations, Implications. Berlin: de Gruyter. See more here.

Recent Projects

One of my current research projects is on multimodal first-aid instructions.

I am also very interested in short video content and, more particularly, on TikTok videos and their corpus/empirical analysis. A paper on annotating these videos with regard to larger amounts of data is currently under review.


Upcoming Workshop and Events

The BreGroMM+ series on Multimodality. Monthly meetings onsite in Groningen or online.

The next Annual Conference of the German Society for Comics Studies (COMFOR) will be in Groningen: 23-25 October 2024!


12ICOM, The next International Conference on Multimodality will be in Groningen in 2025!


Books in Preparation

Handbuch Comicforschung, together with Christian Bachmann, Juliane Blank und Stephan Packard.

Arguing with Multiple Semiotic Modes. Theoretical Issues and Empirical Advances in Multimodal Argumentation Studies, together with Hartmut Stöckl and Assimakis Tseronis, de Gruyter.

Online Lectures

For my online teaching, I prepared videos of online lectures in the broad field of #multimodality, as I teach them in the study course "Communication and Information Studies" (BA/MA) at the University of Groningen, NL.