Vilma Bijeikienė

Vice-Rector for Communication Profile

Vilma Bijeikienė received her bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature, in 1996, and her master’s degree in Linguistics, in 1998, at VMU Faculty of Humanities, completing a year of her bachelor program at Fordham and Creighton Universities in the USA. She received PhD at the University of Bergen, Norway, in 2007 with her research focusing on gender and linguistic indirectness in the British parliamentary discourse. Since 1999 she has worked at VMU as an assistant at the English Department and as a lecturer and associate professor at the Institute of Foreign Languages, where she also held the positions of the Deputy Director in 2009-2015 and the Director in 2015-2020. In 2019 she was elected the Chair of VMU Senate and served till 2020. Since 2012 she is also an Executive Editor of the international Scopus-indexed biannual journal Sustainable Multilingualism. She has participated in various international projects on multilingualism, multiculturalism and plurilingual competence development in higher education and undertaken teaching visits to universities in Germany, Spain, China and Kazakhstan. In 2020 she was elected to the Board of the European Language Council. With over 20 publications, her main research areas include applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, English for specific and academic purposes (ESP, EAP), English medium instruction (EMI), content and language integrated learning (CLIL) and linguistically sensitive teaching (LST).

Her current responsibilities of the Vice-Rector for Communication encompass internal and external communication, focus on community-building and wellbeing, enhancement of diversity and equal opportunities as well as fostering quality internationalisation at home and abroad.