• History of the English language 

• Old and Middle English 

• Historical lexicology and semantics 

• Medieval glosses and glossaries, the history of linguistic thought 

• Writing systems, runes, the Roman alphabet 

• Orality and literacy in the Middle Ages 

• Historical multilingualism 

Annina Seiler joined the English Seminar of the University of Zurich as Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin in 2009. She teaches English historical linguistics at the BA and MA level as well as modern and historical linguistics for students of the Pädagogische Hochschule Zürich. Annina holds a PhD in English Linguistics and an MA in German Linguistics and Literature, English Linguistics, and Comparative Germanic Philology from the University of Zurich.  

In her doctoral dissertation, Annina investigated how Old English and Old High German were first put into writing. Her research shows that, contrary to expectations, early medieval writing systems were highly regular. Her favourite letter of the alphabet is the double-U: in a graphemic love-story of sorts, two U’s were joined together to create this new letter. In her postdoctoral research project, Annina has studied glossaries and dictionaries from the early Anglo-Saxon period to the end of the Middle Ages and beyond. With two colleagues, she has published the handbook Medieval Glossaries from North-Western Europe: Tradition and Innovation (Brepols, 2023). Glossaries are important linguistic and cultural sources, and they are also fun to study. If you don’t believe it, check out her article on the unicorn!  

Annina is co-editor of the book Old English in Switzerland: Manuscripts, Texts and Libraries (Schwabe Verlag, forthcoming), which is one of the outcomes of a project undertaken in 2022 with MA students from the University of Zurich. 

Currently, she is engaged in two collaborative research projects: “Waxing and Waning Words: Lexical Variation and Change in Middle English” (University of Zurich; Olga Timofeeva, Annina Seiler, Johanna Vogelsanger and Rihab Ayed) and “An English Teacher in Paris: John of Garland’s Dictionarius and Medieval Language Learning” (University of Westminster; Heather Pagan, Annina Seiler, Christine Wallis). 

I am happy to supervise BA and MA theses on a range of topics including Old and Middle English language and literature, historical lexicology and lexicography, semantics, grapholinguistics, morphology, onomastics, pragmatics.