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Professor David Willis is the Jesus Professor of Celtic at the University of Oxford and a professorial fellow at Jesus College, affiliated with the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics. He holds a MA in Russian and German, MPhil in General Linguistics, and DPhil in Welsh word order history from the University of Oxford. His research focuses on historical linguistics, syntactic variation, dialectology, and the use of electronic corpora in studying Celtic languages. He has led projects like the Historical Corpus of the Welsh Language and Syntactic Atlas of Welsh Dialects, and currently explores dialect variation using social media data (e.g., Tweetolectology). His recent work examines pronominal subjects in northern European languages. Willis serves on editorial boards of journals like Journal of Linguistics and has held roles in the Linguistics Association of Great Britain. His teaching includes Celtic linguistics, historical syntax, and Slavic languages at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
Research Interests: Historical linguistics, syntactic change mechanisms, Celtic syntax, Slavonic languages, and corpus-based language analysis. He investigates topics such as negation diachrony, syntactic reconstruction, and language contact effects. His current projects apply computational methods to study dialect variation and morphosyntactic innovations.
Awards: Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).
Grants & Labs: Involved in interdisciplinary projects combining historical linguistics with digital tools. Collaborates with institutions like Humboldt University Berlin on pronominal subject studies. His work bridges traditional philology and modern computational approaches.
