My full curriculum vitae
can be consulted here: in English, Dutch, or French.
After high school education in Belgium (Maaseik) and the United States (St. Clair Shores, MI), I got my BA and MA in Dutch and English linguistics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, specializing in Dutch language history, sociolinguistics, older Germanic philology, and psycholinguistics. In the course of the program, I also spent one semester at the University of Wales - Aberystwyth. In 2007, I graduated summa cum laude with an MA dissertation about social and cognitive aspects of past tense regularization in Dutch (advisor Alex Housen).
From 2008 to 2011, I was employed at the Center for Linguistic Research (CLIN) at the VUB, where I wrote my PhD dissertation in historical sociolinguistics. More specifically, I studied language variation, language norms and linguistic identities in 18th and 19th century Southern Dutch. I worked in close cooperation with Wim Vandenbussche, my dissertation supervisor, and Gijsbert Rutten, who joined our team as a visiting postdoctoral fellow in 2008 and 2009. I completed my doctorate in December 2011, and graduated with highest honors and praise from the jury.
In 2012, I hold the Breughel Chair of Flemish Studies as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, I am also employed as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Linguistic Research of the VUB, as well as teaching one course in Dutch sociolinguistics at the Université de Liège.
In my free time, I enjoy reading, hiking, traveling and dining. I am functionally trilingual for Dutch, English and Spanish, fluent in German and French, and have a basic reading knowledge of Danish, Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse and Latin.