Department of Language and Linguistic Science

Professor Monika S. Schmid elected a Fellow of the British Academy

Posted on 15 August 2022

The Head of Department of Language and Linguistic Science, Professor Monika S. Schmid, has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

The distinguished Fellowship was awarded in recognition of her outstanding research, specifically her work on psycho- and neurolinguistic aspects of bilingual development.

Professor Schmid joined the University of York in 2021 after holding academic positions at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the University of Groningen, and the University of Essex. Her research focuses on the deterioration of native or foreign languages, also called language attrition, and the little-understood factors that cause this process.

Professor Schmid said: “The British Academy is an internationally renowned association and counts some of the very best scholars, past and present, among its fellows. I am humbled and honoured to have been selected and look forward to working with my wonderful colleagues there.”

As a newly elected Fellow of the British Academy, she joins a community of over 1,600 leading minds that make up the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

Current Fellows include the classicist Dame Mary Beard, writer Professor Benjamin Zephaniah and 14 University of York academics including Professor Nicky Milner (Department of Archeology), and Professor Gregory Currie (Department of Philosophy).

The 2022 British Academy Fellowships are also remarkable as 56 per cent of newly elected Fellows from UK universities are women - the highest proportion of women ever elected to these positions.