Welcome to Trier!

Trier, Germany’s oldest city, which was also an imperial city in Roman times, is the home of a young university. Trier university, originally founded in 1473, was closed down by Napoleon in 1798 and re-established only in 1970. Students can choose from 30 departments across six faculties with a focus on the Humanities and Social Sciences. At present, about 12.000 students and 2.000 staff study and work at Trier university.

The phonetics department of Trier University has a longstanding tradition in the forensic application of phonetics, and its members have played key roles in shaping IAFP(A). Jens- Peter Koester established the department in 1985 and together with Herbert Masthoff turned Trier into a center for forensic phonetics. Koester’s successor, Angelika Braun, has kept up the tradition. The late Hermann Künzel, long-term head of the speech and audio section at the BKA, was a member of the team as an honorary professor from 1994 to 1999. Taken together, this means that Trier is home to some 150 years of forensic phonetic experience. The forensic application was systematically included into the degree programs, and working on actual cases still forms part of the curriculum. Many Master’s and PhD dissertations on forensic topics have thus been written, and forensic phonetics is a USP of Trier.

Trier was also the venue of the first IAFP meeting outside York and the second one altogether in 1993. The nineteenth meeting was again held in Trier in 2010. In fact, except for York, Trier will now be the only venue to have hosted the IAFP(A) Annual Conference three times.

Both forensic phonetics and IAFPA have come a long way since 1993. Membership has grown to about over 100, a total of 33 conferences have been organized on four continents, and there is a well-established international journal. In 1995, forensic phonetics was recognized by ICPhS for the first time as a regular topic and has since been listed as a session title. At the last ICPhS, held in Prague in 2023 there were 21 papers featuring forensic phonetics.

In this spirit, the members of the department of Phonetics warmly welcome you to the 34th annual conference of IAFPA. We wish you an enjoyable conference with many new insights, exciting research, and invigorating encounters with fellow attendees!

For the local team

Angelika Braun and Katharina Zahner-Ritter