Dr. Marieke Meelen

Biography

Marieke Meelen is an Associate Professor specializing in Historical Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, specifically within the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics. Her primary research interests focus on information structure, comparative syntax, and historical linguistics. Throughout her career, Meelen has been involved in several significant projects, such as 'Emergence of Egophoricity' in collaboration with Professor Hill from Soas University, and 'Pagan Tibet' with Professor Ramble at EPHE-PSL in Paris. She has recently completed an AHRC-funded project investigating the history of subject pronouns alongside Professor Willis from Oxford University and Professor Meier from Berlin. Meelen's doctoral thesis at Leiden University, awarded in 2016, examined computational historical linguistics and reconstructs verb-initial and verb-second word order patterns in the context of information structure, specifically regarding the Welsh Celtic historical context. She has also held a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship, focusing on V2 word orders in Indo-European languages and developing a historical treebank for Welsh. Aside from her research endeavors, she is passionate about teaching Historical Linguistics and NLP in low-resource languages, seeking to mentor postdoctoral researchers and supervise PhD students with a strong background in linguistics.

Research Interests