Cornelia Müller works on multimodal forms of language use, focusing on embodied, affective, and dynamic processes of meaning making in gestures and in audio-visual media. She has published on many facets of gesture as a medium of expression and on multimodal metaphor. She has investigated gestural mimesis, emergent proto-linguistic gestural forms (sedimentation, conventionalization) and developed Methods for Gesture, Film and Metaphor Analysis. Together with Adam Kendon she has launched and co-edited the international journal GESTURE and the book series GESTURE Studies (Benjamins) from 2000 to 2010. With Hermann Kappelhoff, she has developed a transdisciplinary (film studies and linguistic) approach to the experiential and affective dynamics of metaphorical meaning in speech, gestures, and audiovisual media.
Her most recent publications include:
Müller, C. (2024). Dead and Alive, Sleeping and Waking Metaphors: The Spectrum of Metaphor and the Multimodality of Discourse. In: Anders Örtenblad (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Metaphor in Organization Studies. Oxford: Univ. Press.
Müller, C. (2024). Gestural mimesis as ‚as-if‘ action. In: Przemysław Zywiczynski, Johan Blomberg and Monika Boruta-Zywiczynska (eds.) Perspectives on Pantomime. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Müller C. (2023). Language from the Body – Dynamic relations between gestures and signed language. In: Terry Janzen and Barbara Shaffer (eds.), Signed Language and Gesture Research in Cognitive Linguistics, XIII-XVI. De Gruyter Mouton.
Müller, C. (2022). Obituary, Adam Kendon 1934-2022. In: Gesture 21, 2/3, 157-166.
