Before joining the Department of English and Linguistics as a Professor of English Linguistics, I spent three years as Departmental Lecturer at the University of Oxford. During my time in Oxford, I taught classes for the Master of Studies "English Language“ and supervised dissertations (MSt, MA, DPhil). I was also a tutor for Oriel, Worcester and Jesus colleges, and completed the Postgraduate Diploma in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.
From 2009 to 2012, I was assistant professor at Chemnitz University of Technology, where I also completed my postdoctoral thesis ("Habilitation“) in 2012. In it, I discuss factors that influence the use of null subjects in spoken English (such as the fact that hardly anyone will say something like "Know“ instead of "I know“, but that "Would never have thought of that“ is actually a very common type of utterance). I spent the academic year 2008/09 at the University of Kent (Canterbury) as a Leverhulme Visiting Research Fellow.
Until 2008, I was a researcher and lecturer at the English Department of the University of Freiburg, where I also completed my PhD (2003). My PhD thesis focuses on gender assignment in the traditional dialects of Southwest England (where apples are "hes“) and Newfoundland, Canada (where storms are "shes“). I studied English Philology, Latin Philology and General Linguistics at Freiburg, graduating in 1998 with a Magister Artium. My research interests include sociolinguistics and Language Variation and Change in L1 varieties of English, focusing on morphosyntactic features; urban and traditional dialectology; corpus linguistics; and issues in the statistical modelling of sociolinguistic variables. I have supervised theses on topics such as Multicultural London English in radio presenters’ speech, the use of the hashtag on Twitter, and features of Irish English in a corpus of 19th century emigrant letters.
I’m interested in supervising quantitatively oriented sociolinguistics topics in general and comparative-contrastive studies in particular. Dialectological topics as well as qualitative sociolinguistics studies are also welcome.