معرفی
Jessica Nowak is a Junior Professor for Historical Linguistics of German at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, where she has held her position since November 2016 with several interruptions for acting professorships at other institutions. She has served as Acting Professor for German Grammar at the Free University of Berlin (2023-2024, 2020-2021) and for Historical German Linguistics at the University of Leipzig (2021-2022). Her academic journey began with a Master's degree in German Philology, Romance Studies/Spanish and Journalism from JGU Mainz, followed by her doctoral studies culminating in her promotion to Dr. phil. in 2015, for which she received the Research Award of the Friends of the University of Mainz.
Dr. Nowak's research interests center around historical linguistics, German linguistics, morphology (particularly verb morphology), syntax, language change, graphematics (writing systems and capitalization), German as a Foreign Language, language didactics, and onomastics. Her work often bridges theoretical linguistics with practical applications in language teaching, especially regarding language history in school contexts. She has published extensively on topics including sentence-internal capitalization across Germanic languages, historical verb morphology, name research, and linguistic doubt cases in German.
Analysis of her recent publications (2020-2024) reveals a strong focus on the intersection of historical linguistics and language education. Her work demonstrates consistent interest in German orthography evolution (particularly capitalization patterns), name research across various contexts, and the application of historical linguistic knowledge to contemporary language teaching. She frequently employs corpus-based methodologies and cross-linguistic comparisons, particularly between German, Dutch, and English.
- Research Award (for dissertations) of the Friends of the University of Mainz eV (2015)
Dr. Nowak has been an active academic advisor, supervising numerous Bachelor's, Master's, and doctoral theses. Her supervision spans various aspects of German linguistics, with particular emphasis on historical linguistics, morphology, syntax, and language variation. She has also been involved in significant research projects, including linguistic processing and annotation of a specialized historical corpus on 17th-century South German nuns' language usage. Her collaborative work with Stefan Hartmann, Uta Nolting, and others demonstrates her commitment to interdisciplinary research.
She leads and participates in various academic initiatives, including workshop organization on topics like "The Awful German Language: Grammatical Stolpersteine" for DAAD language assistants, and has contributed to the National Research Data Infrastructure Initiative "Text+" as part of the Scientific Coordination Committee for Lexical Resources.
