Franz Andres Morrissey is an affiliated researcher at the English Department since he retired from his teaching lecturership. He is a linguist by training, has always been passionate about teaching, and is a jack-of-all-trades – but sadly master-of-none – in his creative pursuits, which include music (trad. folk, Blues and Rock), writing (three pantos, several one-act plays, poems and songs) and cooking (Mediterranean, Indian, Cajun), not necessarily in this order.
He has always been fascinated by language, by its sounds and its potency, he loves words and exploring ways in which they can be combined to the best effect in society, in academic and in artistic writing. His current interests are the sociolinguistics of (folk) song performance, discourse strategies and story-telling in song, music and story-telling as instances of oral history; other areas of interest include the relationship between words and music, the phonology of rock, the stylistics of oral literature, and the future of minority languages and language minorities.
While he was an active teaching lecturer, he focused on various areas of linguistics (see www.morrissey.ch), but between 1995 and 2021 he was also responsible for workshops on creative writing (his was the first institutionalised creative writing workshop in Swiss tertiary education), which he still teaches as a visiting lecturer. Furthermore, from 2007 until his retirement he ran classes that explored staging dramatic texts, which gave students an opportunity to stage performances of material from classic drama to self-penned works, at the same time imparting techniques for public speaking and voice control. These days he still teaches creative writing workshops, presents and performs songs related to historical topics at gymnasia and other universities and runs seminars on science communication.
Music of various genres has always been a part of his life, and since his retirement he is very active in this area with concerts, mainly of Folk, in Switzerland and concert tours of the UK.
Lastly and more personally, he has never been known to spurn a good meal in pleasant company, to turn down an opportunity to perform, to miss out on reinforcing his reputation as the department’s worst punman and is, this won’t come as a surprise, unquestioningly in favour of peace, love and siblinghood.
