Eleanor Coghill

Professor in Semitic Languages at Department of Linguistics and Philology

Telephone:: +46 18 471 10 02
E-mail:: Eleanor.Coghill@lingfil.uu.se
Visiting address:: Engelska parken
Thunbergsvägen 3H
Postal address:: Box 527
751 20 UPPSALA

Download contact information for Eleanor Coghill at Department of Linguistics and Philology

ORCID:: 0000-0002-0451-4397

Short presentation

I have been Professor of Semitic Languages at Uppsala since 2016. My research and teaching interests extend across Semitic Languages and Linguistics. My work has focused on Aramaic, especially the North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic languages. Given these are highly endangered, documentation has been a priority. My research also has a diachronic focus, looking at the development of Aramaic, in particular the effects of language contact. I am also interested in the Arabic dialects of the same region.

Keywords

Biography

I studied Oriental Studies (Assyriology, Arabic and Hebrew) at the University of Cambridge (BA 1998, MPhil 1999, PhD 2004). I was employed as a Junior Research Fellow at Fitzwilliam College Cambridge (2002–2005), then as a Research Associate at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Cambridge, working on the North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic Database Project (2004–2009). After this I was employed as Research Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz (2010–2015), leading the (German Research Foundation-funded) project Neo-Aramaic morpho-syntax in its areal-linguistic context. I was a Substitute Professor at the University of Konstanz in 2015, also working as a Researcher on the project Language and Space at the University of Zürich (2015–2016). I took up the Chair in Semitic Languages at Uppsala in August 2016. In 2023-24, funded by a Riksbankens Jubileumsfond sabbatical, I was a visiting researcher at Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Graz.

Research

My publications (or drafts of them) can be found at:

https://uppsala.academia.edu/EleanorCoghill

My most important work to date is the monograph The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic: Cycles of Alignment Change (2016), published by Oxford University Press.

PhD students

Current

(as second supervisor or committee member)

Rimon Wehbi, Western Neo-Aramaic Syntax, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, 2023–

Catrin Seepo, Phonetic Variation Across Registers in an Endangered Language: A Mixed-Effects Approach to the Alqoshi dialect of Chaldean Neo-Aramaic, University of Florida 2025–

PhD students who have defended

Johan Ljungberg, Biblical Hebrew Verbs, Poetry and Clause Combining. Exploring the Dynamics of Gram-Switching in the Psalms, Uppsala University (defence 7. May 2025)

Mahmut Ağbaht, The Arabic of Šɛ̄xṭɔ̄ba/Shaykh Taba (northern Lebanon) in its Regional Context, Uppsala University (defence 9. December 2023)

Ariel Gutman, Attributive constructions in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic, Konstanz University (defence 2016, winner of the Preis der Stadt Konstanz zur Förderung des Wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses an der Universität Konstanz, published open access in 2018)