Rate My Professor Merja Stenroos

Stenroos has directed major projects, including the development of the Middle English Grammar Corpus (MEG-C) and the Corpus of Middle English Local Documents (MELD), the latter yielding the edited volume Records of Real People: Linguistic Variation in Middle English Local Documents (John Benjamins, 2020, co-edited with Kjetil V. Thengs). From January 2025, she leads the ERC Advanced Grant-funded project Linguistic Traces: Low-Frequency Forms as Evidence of Language and Population History (LiTra), awarded 2.5 million euros, which investigates low-frequency linguistic variation to reconstruct early language and population dynamics, including Celtic and Scandinavian influences on English. Her extensive publications include contributions to The Oxford Handbook of the History of English (2012, with William A. Kretzschmar Jr.), articles in English Language and Linguistics (2008) and Journal of Historical Pragmatics (2010), and chapters on historical dialectology and spelling practices. These corpora and studies have advanced understanding of Middle English scribal practices and linguistic evolution.