I studied English language and medieval literature (major), American language and literature, and political science (minors) at the University of Bonn. During the academic year 1999/2000 I attended the University of York as a visiting student. I graduated in late 2003 with an M. A. (Magistra Artium). My M. A. thesis was entitled “Vorwurfs- und Korrektivverhalten von Männern und Frauen im Englischen”. In this thesis I analysed complaint sequences in four American plays. 
From 2003 until 2005 I was involved in a research project at the University of Erfurt entitled “Linguistic reflections of recontextualised identities in local & global lingua-franca-discourse”. The project was directed by Christiane Meierkord and funded by the VolkswagenStiftung. I used the data which were collected within the scope of this project for my PhD thesis entitled “Linguistic Variation in Black South African English”. I completed my thesis in April 2009 and defended in August 2009. In my thesis, I focussed on a quantitative analysis of four selected BSAE features, namely the omission of articles, the omission of past tense marking, the use of the progressive, and the use of left dislocation. My aim was to find out which of these features are stable, i.e. commonly used by BSAE speakers regardless of where they are placed on the lectal continuum. My thesis was published under the title Variation in the Grammar of Black South African English by Peter Lang in 2010.
I have been at the RUB since October 2009. I teach BA-level courses in linguistics and English language practice. Before coming to Bochum I taught at the universities of Erfurt, Bonn, and Münster.
I am mainly interested in World Englishes - especially in Postcolonial Englishes in Africa and Asia, Pragmatics, Second Language Acquisition and the Mental Lexicon.