Katerina Somers
Credentials: German
Position title: Assistant Professor
Pronouns: she/her/hers
Email: kisomers@wisc.edu
Address:
Office Number: 842 Van Hise Hall
Languages: German, including its historical varieties (Old, Middle, and Early New High German and Old Saxon); Old English; Gothic
Research/Language Interests: (Socio-)historical linguistics, syntactic and morphosyntactic change, orality and literacy in early medieval Europe, Carolingian documentary culture, biblical translation, and language epistemologies.
About Me: Katerina Somers returned to the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2018. Her second book, How to Create an Early German Scriptus. The Literization Approach to Historical Syntax, is in press. It presents a new methodology for the study of historical texts, especially a language’s first attestations. Her current research looks to apply this book’s methodology to a broader corpus of historical texts. This work also traces how modern epistemological orientations in diachronic linguistics reflect the nationalistically and ideologically driven ideas of the early philologists.
Education:
• University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ph.D. in Germanic Linguistics (2007)
• University of Wisconsin-Madison, M.A. in German (2003)
• University of Chicago, M.A. in History (2000)
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, B.A. in German and Political Science (1998)