Professor Kriszta Eszter Szendröi is a distinguished academic at the University of Vienna, where she serves as Professor of Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics within the Faculty of Philology and Cultural Studies. Her extensive teaching portfolio includes courses on morphology, syntax, Yiddish language, and information structure across multiple semesters including upcoming 2025W and 2025S terms. Professor Szendröi's primary research interests span theoretical and experimental linguistics with a specialized focus on Yiddish linguistics. Her groundbreaking work documents significant grammatical changes in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish (CHY), including the complete loss of morphological gender and case marking across global Hasidic communities. She has conducted extensive fieldwork resulting in over 100 hours of recordings with speakers from Israel, New York, Montreal and London, examining both theoretical linguistic analysis and sociolinguistic context. Her scholarly output reveals a consistent focus on the syntax-prosody interface, particularly regarding focus movement and its acquisition across languages. Szendröi has pioneered research on CHY as a distinct linguistic variety, examining innovations in its pronominal system and the Hebrew/Aramaic component within the language. Her work also extends to community engagement, notably translating critical health information during the COVID-19 pandemic for Hasidic communities worldwide. Professor Szendröi has secured significant research funding through an AHRC-funded project on Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish conducted with Lily Kahn. The project involved international collaboration and extensive fieldwork across multiple countries, resulting in numerous publications in top linguistics journals and edited volumes. She has mentored doctoral students including Riccardo Pulicani (on quantifier raising and information structure) and Cecile Larralde (on focus effects on negation-disjunction interactions). Her collaborative research network spans international institutions, working with scholars from the University of Edinburgh, University of Potsdam, and others on language acquisition studies involving children in Hasidic communities. Professor Szendröi leads the YUNG YiDiSH WIEN initiative, a dedicated space for Yiddish language and culture in Vienna that serves both the academic community and local Yiddish-speaking Orthodox populations. Her research team has made significant contributions to documenting and analyzing Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish as a living, evolving language variety, establishing it as a distinct linguistic phenomenon worthy of scholarly attention.
