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I hold a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Geneva. In 2001-2002, I was a visiting scholar in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T) (Cambridge, MA), on a fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

My main expertise lies in the syntax, morphosyntax, and the syntax-semantics interface of nominal expressions, in a cross-linguistic perspective. My research interests include partitivity (du/des ‘of.the’ and en ‘of.it/them’ in French), gender issues (semantic and grammatical gender), but also selection issues (SNSF research project Selection at the interfaces), the grammar of special registers such as diaries, and the History of English.

From 2011 to 2016, I investigated several diachronic questions, in particular the loss of verb movement and adverb placement, and the distribution of auxiliaries with respect to adverbs in Middle and Early Modern English, on two projects funded by the SNSF and directed by Eric Haeberli (https://p3.snf.ch/Project-124619 and https://p3.snf.ch/Project-143302).

From 2014 to 2017, I directed the SNSF project "Selection at the interface" (team: 1 post-doctoral fellow and 1 doctoral student). The aim of the project was to examine nominal (say [a word]) and clausal complements (say [that John is happy]) in order to determine (i) their structure (syntax), (ii) the meaningful link between these constituents and their structural environment (semantics) and (iii) what is encoded in the lexical items involved (lexicon): https://p3.snf.ch/Project-146699

In August 2016, I joined the URPP Language and Space and the research group Systems of Nominal Determination in contact (SyNoDe) at the University of Zurich (https://www.uzh.ch/cmsssl/spur/en/research/Language-in-Space/synode.html). 

In collaboration with Petra Sleeman (U. Amsterdam), I studied the L2 acquisition of the French pronoun en by native speakers of Dutch and German and the expression of partitivity in Dutch, French and German, analyzing data corresponding to the contexts in which French uses the pronoun en ‘of.it/them’ (2016-2018). 

From 2018 to 2022, I worked as the coordinator and a scientific collaborator at UZH on the research project Distribution and Function of 'Partitive Articles' in Romance (DiFuPaRo): a microvariation analysis, directed by Elisabeth Stark (U.  Zurich) and Cecilia Poletto (Frankfurt am Main): https://www.rose.uzh.ch/en/seminar/wersindwir/mitarbeitende/Stark/DiFuPaRo.html

From March 2021 to January 2024, I replaced Elisabeth Stark, Vice President Research of the University of Zurich, in parts of her professor's functions (50%) at the Romanisches Seminar: https://www.rose.uzh.ch/de/seminar/wersindwir/mitarbeitende/ihsane.html

In February 2024, I was appointed Associate Professor of linguistics at the University of Geneva.