Lauren Gawne is an Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures. Lauren's research focuses on the use of gesture with speech and the cross-cultural variation in gestures. Lauren also works on the use of emoji, critical approaches to research data and the grammar of Tibeto-Burman languages. 

Lauren is a passionate advocate for communicating linguistics to a range of audiences. She co-hosts the podcast Lingthusiasm with Gretchen McCulloch, and runs the generalist linguistics website Superlinguo. Lauren was a founding organiser of the International Conference for Communicating Linguistics and the LingComm grants program.

Lauren's PhD from The University of Melbourne focused on the use of evidentiality in Lamjung Yolmo. Lauren has held competitive Post-Doctoral fellowships at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (2014-2015), SOAS, University of London (funded through the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme) (2015-2017), and La Trobe University (2017-2019).

Lauren is available for consulting work and public engagement. Lauren has limited capacity for new graduate supervision projects. If you are contacting Lauren about graduate research please outline direct links between your intended project and Lauren's existing research areas (please note Lauren is unable to supervise projects on English language teaching).