Dr. Lea Schäfer took over the professorship for German Linguistics / Language History on 1 May 2024. She previously worked on her own projects and research fellowships at Philipps-Universität Marburg (2022 to 2024) and Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (2017 to 2022). She received her doctorate in 2015 as part of a DFG project at Philipps-Universität Marburg on the language of Jewish figures in German literature and habilitated there in 2021 on the special grammar of proper names in the Germanic languages. In her empirical and interdisciplinary teaching and research, she focuses on the description and analysis of historical language change phenomena and language contact situations of German and closely related languages and embeds them in global contexts.