Dr Elisabeth El Refai

I joined Cardiff University in 2005. Before that, I worked as a Lecturer in German at Plymouth University.

I did my PhD (‘Flooding Fortress Europe’: Metaphor and Visual Rhetoric in Austrian Newspaper Discourses about Asylum Seekers) at Bradford University, and before that I completed a PGCE in secondary education and an MEd in Education and the Media.

I am originally from Vienna, where I studied Media and Journalism, and worked for several newspapers and news agencies. This inspired some of my earliest research projects, including on Austrian press politics in the interwar period (1936-1938), media representations of the controversial contemporary Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek, and (for my PhD) verbal and visual metaphors in Austrian press reports about asylum seekers.