I am currently working as a PhD-Student in the SNSF-funded research project The Language of the Labouring Poor in Late Modern England. Besides the main aim of the project (see project description), the aim of my work is to investigate the pauper petition letters from a normative perspective, by (a) comparing the lower-class language – in terms of orthography and selected linguistic variables (subjunctive, preposition placement, shall/will, negation, do-periphrasis, strong/weak verbs, adjective/superlative) – to the language of letters by the contemporary middling sorts and the elite, and by (b) taking the socio-historical context into consideration, i.e. education opportunities and literacy levels between the different social orders.
Before starting this position, I completed both my Bachelor’s (2018) degree in English and German, as well as my Master’s (2020) degree in English and Linguistics at the University of Lausanne. In 2019, I have received the Prix de Faculté, étudiant en mobilité OUT, for my exchange year at Texas A&M University. I wrote my Master’s thesis on The Representation of Migrants in U.S. Newspapers from 1798-1990: A Historical Analysis of Metaphors and Pronominalization in the Discourse of Migration.