I'm a non-tenured assistant professor (Akademischer Rat a.Z.) at the Romanisches Seminar, Chair Prof. Dr. Daniela Marzo at the University of Freiburg.

In my Ph.D. thesis under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Daniela Marzo and Prof. Dr. Maria Selig (submitted on 09/15/2025 and defended on 05/28/2026), I treated the variation in grammatical gender in Old Occitan. By integrating corpus-linguistic, typological, and sociolinguistic methods, this research succeeds in tracing the dynamics of gender-systems in usage. For this sake, a corpus was created based on 17 manuscripts from the Languedoc and Provence, written in the 13th and 14th centuries. This enables me to grasp the variation present in medieval languages and avoids biases from the normalisation of editions. With this approach, the investigation of gender variation is based on a solid empirical foundation and thus demonstrates the kinds of new insights that become attainable when linguistic data are approached from a historically informed, discourse-tradition-aware, text-pragmatic, and norm-historical perspective.

 

It is now published and available as an Open Access publication with the title "Grammatical Gender in Old Occitan. A Variationist Corpus-based Approach".