I am an FWO junior postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University. My research area is morphosyntactic variation in Romance, with a special focus on the varieties spoken in southern Italy. In my research, I use formal syntactic theory to analyse data from these relatively understudied languages, which – presenting more (micro)variation than standardised ones – can offer us crucial information about how languages can vary and change. In October 2022, I started a project on pragmatic uses of expletive pronouns in Campanian and other southern Italian varieties, supervised by Claudia Crocco.
I studied for a BA in Italian (2011) and a BA in Classics (2012) at Leiden University. I continued my studies in Leiden with a MA in Italian (2014) and a MA in Linguistics (2015). I then went on to do a PhD at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Adam Ledgeway. My dissertation (2020) analyses the syntactic reflexes of finiteness in Romance, by studying those verb forms which do not fit into the traditional dichotomy between finite and non-finite, such as the inflected and personal infinitives, and the Balkan-style finite complementation.
Before starting my FWO fellowship, I taught at the Italian department at Leiden University in 2019, and I worked as an affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages of the University of Cambridge in 2019-2020. In February 2020 I started working in Ghent as a postdoctoral assistant in Latin and Italian linguistics.
At the department of linguistics at UGent, I am the junior coordinator of the research group ΔiaLing, and co-founder of the Ghent Generative Grammar Group (G4).
My wider research interests include (theoretical) syntax, diachronic linguistics, Italian dialectology, the transition from Latin to Romance, as well as Romance languages more generally.
