Conference | Leiden-Birmingham Lectures

Sign language emergence and diachronic change

Date: Wednesday 5 November 2025
Serie: Leiden-Birmingham Lectures
Address: The Grand Room, Staff House, University of Birmingham

The second edition of the Leiden-Birmingham Lectures will take place at the University of Birmingham. In addition to lectures, there will be a brainstorm session with researchers from both universities to support early career scholars.

The languages of the event are International Sign and English. The lectures will be hybrid and recorded, and published online, in an effort to jointly work towards an open library of bilingual lectures on cross-modal linguistics. The lectures will be part of the online program of the School for Digital Deaf Studies (in-person program took place in August 2025 in Ghana).

Programme

10:00 – 10:15	Gerardo Ortega University of Birmingham Victoria Nyst Leiden University Opening remarks
10:15 – 10:45	Marta Morgado University of Birmingham ‘I want the world to see me and understand me’: The impact of International Sign on Sign Languages
10:45 – 11:15	Adrien Dadone Leiden University Causative-GIVE in LSF (French Sign Language): a case of cross-linguistically non-uniform grammaticalization
11:15 – 11:30	Comfort break
11:30 – 12:00	Marah Jarasai University of Birmingham Referent Tracking in the Kufr Qassem deaf community: an intergenerational study
12:00 – 12:30	Debora Campos Wanderley Leiden University [Title to be confirmed]
12:30-13:00	Kate Bellamy Leiden University Discussion
13:00 – 14:00	Lunch
14:00 – 16:00	Postgraduate roundtable (see below)
16:00 - 16:15	Comfort break
16:15 – 17:00	Seedbed of ideas (see below)
19:00 – 21:00	Dinner

Postgraduate roundtable

PhD students and postdocs are invited to give a 5 min-presentation of their work and highlight some of the challenges they are currently facing (data coding, statistical analysis, ethics, publication, archiving, dissemination, glossing, amongst any others). These will be discussed amongst all delegates and potential solutions will be identified. This will be an informal meeting so there is no need to prepare a Power Point.

Seedbed of ideas

Researchers from Leiden and Birmingham will close the event with an informal conversation summarising the take-home message of the lectures and postgraduate roundtable and discuss three key questions:

Is there scope for a joint research project between Leiden and Birmingham, and if so, what would its focus be?
Is there potential to develop a joint training programme between Leiden and Birmingham under the topic of sign languages and gesture (e.g., joint doctoral programme, joint undergraduate courses)? E.g., Can we establish some form of ‘lecture swap’, where staff from each institution will teach one class to students of the other institution?
Is there interest in multidisciplinary research between sign/gestures researchers and other members of staff within and across institutions?

Registration

You can register via the button below. The deadline for registering for in-person participation is 1 November.