We are delighted to announce that CCGS Director Ioanna Sitaridou has been appointed Professor of Spanish and Historical Linguistics.
Professor Sitaridou graduated from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1997 with a BA in French Philology and after achieving a MA in Linguistics from University College, London in 1998, she went on to receive a PhD in Romance linguistics at the University of Manchester in 2002.
She was appointed postdoctoral researcher at the Research Centre on Multilingualism at the University of Hamburg in 2002, where she investigated word order in Old Romance and the licensing/loss of null subjects in the history of French and Occitan. In 2004, Ioanna joined the University of Cambridge as a lecturer at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, where she lectures on Spanish, Hispanic linguistics, and the comparative linguistics of the Romance languages. She is a Fellow of Queen's College, where she is also Director of Studies in Linguistics and a Director of Studies in Modern and Medieval Languages. Professor Sitaridou joined the Cambridge Centre for Greek Studies in 2019 as Deputy Director and became a Director in 2020.
Ioanna's main areas of research are comparative and diachronic syntax of the Romance languages, in particular 13th Century Spanish, as well as dialectal Spanish; and dialectal Greek, especially Pontic Greek. She in Principal Investigator on The Romeyka Project, which aims at documenting the endangered Greek dialect spoken in North-East Turkey for which she was awarded the Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellowship in Hellenic Studies by Princeton University in Spring 2011. Her work has also been recognised by Harvard University and Labex EFL and featured in both national and international media. Ioanna uses her research, and the resulting publicity, to educate on bilingualism, promote linguistic self-esteem, especially for female speakers in remote areas of Turkey.