Lukas Bleichenbacher joined the English Department in 2002 as an assistant in English Philology (Linguistics and Medieval Literature). His research interests include sociolinguistic approaches to multilingualism and language choice, language ideologies, the study of media discourse, and language policy analysis. He has published on ideological aspects of language choices and policies in Switzerland and Slovakia, and on the representation of multilingualism in contemporary Hollywood movies.

Lukas Bleichenbacher grew up in England and Switzerland, and studied English and French in Zurich, Dublin (UCD) and Geneva. He graduated in 2002 with a Lizenziat (equivalent to an M.A.) from the University of Zurich, and obtained a high school teaching diploma (Höheres Lehramt Mittelschule) from the Canton of Zurich in 2005. In 2007, he completed his doctoral thesis Multilingualism in the Movies: Hollywood Characters and Their Language Choices.

Since 2003, he has taught a variety of courses at the University of Zurich and at Zurich University of Teacher Education (Pädagogische Hochschule PHZH), including Introduction to Linguistics, Introduction to Old and Middle English, and courses on multilingualism. In autumn 2007, he co-taught a Lizentiat seminar on language policy with Prof. Dr. Andreas Fischer in Zurich, and a seminar entitled The Representation of Language(s) in Film, Literature and Translation with Dr. Adrian Pablé at the University of Lausanne.