I hold a Master’s of Education from the University of Bremen and a PhD in German Linguistics from the Pennsylvania State University. In my research I work with minority and heritage speakers of German varieties, such as Low German speakers in Iowa and Illinois, Pennsylvania Dutch speakers in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and German-Jewish settlers in the Dominican Republic. I am interested in the processes leading to communal language shift and its potential effects on the grammar of heritage speakers, especially in the morphosyntax. In my dissertation, I researched the use of verb-third main clauses in Iowa Low German while considering the role of prosody and information structure for such structures.