I am an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics and the School of Language Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem since 2012. In 2013, I was appointed a member of the interdisciplinary Language, Logic and Cognition Center. Before this, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Ramses Project (and later a Visiting Professor) at the University of Liège, a Kreitman Fellow at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and spent 2010-2012 at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows in Jerusalem. I also spent some time in 2011 as a Senior Research Fellow of the TOPOI project at Humboldt University in Berlin.
The problems that trouble me tend to revolve around the questions: Why are languages the way that they are? How do they become the way they are? My research and teaching focus on three main areas. The first is descriptive linguistics and philology of Coptic-Egyptian, an Afroasiatic language attested for about 4000 years. The second is language variation and change, with special interest in grammaticalization and contact-induced change. The third is language typology. These interests often converge.
My current projects are concentrated in the new Dynamics of Language Lab (DoLL), including:
- The typology of borrowing of adpositions and other case-markers.
- Contact-induced change in transitivity and valency patterns (with Sebastian Richter)
- Long-term and cyclical grammatical change in Coptic-Egyptian (with Stéphane Polis)
- Case, agreement, and information structure (with Giorgio Iemmolo).
I teach courses in historical linguistics, typology, and Coptic-Egyptian descriptive linguistics, as well as the Introduction to Linguistics.