Dr Theresa Biberauer

Theresa Biberauer completed a BA and MA at Stellenbosch University, before coming to St John's to do an M.Phil. in English and Applied Linguistics and then a PhD in Theoretical Linguistics. Her doctoral research focused on some of the structural peculiarities of Afrikaans, a language which is often (incorrectly) described as “the youngest language in the world” and which is also typically (again, incorrectly) thought to be a simplified clone of its European parent, Dutch. She held a Junior Research Fellowship at Newnham College, concurrently with the first of a series of AHRC- and ERC-funded research positions, also spending an inspiring term in the Linguistics Department at the University of California at Santa Cruz along the way. Prior to returning to St John's, she was a Fellow at Churchill College. Beyond Cambridge, Theresa is Professor Extraordinary at her South African alma mater, a research affiliate at the Center for Research in Syntax, Semantics and Phonology (CRISSP) at KU Leuven (Belgium), and a Mercator Fellow in the context of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft-funded Negation in Language and Beyond project co-hosted by the Universities of Frankfurt, Göttingen and Tübingen.

Theresa supervises widely across the Linguistics papers offered in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, contributing in particular to the introductory and advanced Syntax and Morphology papers, the papers on Language Acquisition, Language Typology and Cognition, Historical Linguistics, the History of English, and the final-year Linguistic Theory paper. She also supervises undergraduate dissertations and Year Abroad projects, and dissertation work at both MPhil and PhD level. She was thrilled to receive the 2021 Student-Led Teaching Award for small-group teaching in Arts & Humanities. Beyond Cambridge, she is also an enthusiastic teacher at international summer schools.