معرفی
Prof. Dr. Melitta Gillmann serves as Full Professor for German Studies/Linguistics and Managing Director of the Institute of German Studies within the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Currently on maternity/parental leave, she maintains active research leadership while overseeing institutional governance.
Her academic credentials include a doctorate from the University of Hamburg (2015) and a 1st State Examination in German, Latin Philology, and Pedagogy from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She previously held positions as Junior Professor for Historical Linguistics at the University of Hamburg (2015-2022) and Acting Professor at Otto-Friedrich University of Bamberg (2019-2020).
Gillmann's research spans core areas of German linguistics with emphasis on:
- Diachronic development of grammatical structures
- Spatial and temporal variation in language
- Pragmatic functions of discourse elements
- Corpus-based analysis of contemporary language use
- Empirical methodology in linguistic education
Her current publications reveal strong focus on grammaticalization processes and morphological theory in Germanic languages, particularly examining how vocatives evolve into discourse markers and analyzing discontinuous morphological patterns across Germanic varieties.
Administratively, she contributes as elected member of the Institute Conference (since 2024) and BA/MA Examination Board member (since 2023). Her grant portfolio includes a DFG-funded project on auxiliary variation (2023-2026) and the KEY YouTube corpus initiative (2024-2026) funded through UDE's Teaching and Learning Innovations program.
She directs a research team comprising seven student assistants working across two primary projects, while also coordinating academic events such as the upcoming July 2025 student conference on evaluative constructions in language.
