Sarah Greifenstein is a junior professor for media, culture and communication at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), where she works with a transdisciplinary profile, enhancing her focus on film and media aesthetics by reflecting and adopting perspectives from linguistic research on metaphor, gesture and multimodality. Additionaly, she is member of the board of directors at ZeM – The Brandenburg Center for Media Studies. Before that, she was a lecturer at the seminar of film studies at Freie Universität Berlin and research assistant at the cluster Languages of Emotion in the project „Multimodal Metaphor and Expressive Movement.”

Greifenstein’s research foci encompass affectivity and temporality in audiovisual images, gesture, voice and facial expressions in film, cinematic metaphors and embodied constitutions of meaning, verbalism and film, as well film analytical methods.

In 2020, Greifenstein published her monograph, Tempi der Bewegung – Modi des Gefühls. Expressivität, heitere Affekte und die Screwball Comedy (DeGruyter), which discusses the temporal arrangements of hilarious affects in the viewing experiences of Screwball Comedies. Additionally, she published several papers on the embodied dimensions of meaning construction in film experience, and she co-edited the volume Cinematic Metaphor in Perspective. Reflections on a Transdisciplinary Framework (De Gruyter, 2018) together with Dorothea Horst, Thomas Scherer, Christina Schmitt, Hermann Kappelhoff and Cornelia Müller.