Ekaterina Soloveva Woodyard

Ekaterina (Katya) Soloveva Woodyard, a Lecturer in the German Department at Princeton, received her Ph.D. in German Language and Literature from Georgetown University in 2024, where she defended her dissertation, “Post-Soviet Migrant Identity in Germany: A Multimodal Systemic Functional Linguistics-based Study of Instagram Discourse”. Her research focuses on visual and verbal discourse analysis, examining the identities of post-Soviet migrants who came to Germany in the 1990s or were born to migrant parents and came of age in Germany.

In her dissertation, Katya utilized ideological framework of Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA), which highlights the empowering role of language in marginalized communities, and methodological framework Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which focuses on the meaning-making potential of language as a social semiotic system, as well as sociolinguistic theory of interactional stancetaking, to examine Instagram discourse by post-Soviet migrant activists in Germany. By analyzing Instagram’s verbal and visual components—images, captions, and comments—through SFL-based tools like the Appraisal Framework and Visual Grammar, her study explores how post-Soviet migrant activists assert their identities, align with one another, resist marginalization, and create empowering narratives for their communities.

Katya has previously worked as a German and Humanities instructor at Georgetown University, a translator for the French-German television network ARTE, and a contributor to the Moskauer Deutsche Zeitung. Her research interests include post-Soviet migrant identity, social media discourse, Positive and Critical Discourse Analysis, second language acquisition, and curriculum design. Katya is passionate about integrating diverse perspectives into German language teaching.