Francesco Gardani - Biography#

Francesco Gardani got an MA (2002) and a PhD (2009) in Linguistics from the University of Vienna, and was awarded a Habilitation in Italian and General Linguistics from the University of Zurich in 2019.

Since 2004, Gardani has held research and teaching positions at seven universities in five countries (in chronological order, the University of Vienna, Austria; Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria; the University of Graz, Austria; the University of Zurich, Switzerland; Columbia University in the City of New York, USA; the University of the Basque Country, Spain; the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong). In addition, he taught at five international summer schools (Australia, Italy, Norway, Switzerland, USA). In 2020, F. Gardani was appointed Professor of Romance Philology at the University of Zurich.

Gardani’s areas of scholarship are Italo-Romance linguistics, language contact, morphology and typology. His publications include papers and books (of which two monographs and several edited volumes) that have featured in top-ranked scientific journals and internationally renowned publishing houses. In addition to this, he has been working on a third monograph, Morphological borrowing (under contract with Oxford University Press). As of 2025, Gardani’s h-index on GoogleScholar is 20.

F. Gardani has (co)organized a number of successful international workshops and conferences (such as the International Morphology Meeting series in Vienna); has organized, directed, and conducted several fieldwork activities; has experience in actively pursuing external research funding, attracting grants, and collaborating in funded projects. The larger third-party funded endeavors, in which he was involved, include:

• Syntactic transfer in the Italian spoken in New York City (2019; USD 29,500) as PI;
  

• Diacronía de la animacidad (2019-2022; EUR 38,720) as a co-investigator;
  

• La categorización de la animacidad desde una perspectiva tipológica (2015-2017; EUR 42,350) as a co-investigator;
  

• Linguistic Morphology in Time and Space (2016-2019; CHF 1,500,000) as proposal co-writer and senior postdoctoral researcher.
  

F. Gardani has a long and notable experience in teaching: since 2005, he has taught 47 different course types (some of which for more than one term) at five universities and at five summer schools, in four languages (Italian, German, English and Spanish). The level of the courses spanned through all academic levels, from BA to PostDoc. His teaching portfolio includes courses in general and comparative linguistics (phonology, morphosyntax, morphology, language contact, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, syntax), Italian and Italo-Romance linguistics, economic geography of Italy, as well as language training in Italian and Spanish. F. Gardani has supervised students spanning from BA to PhD level and mentored several postdoctoral researchers.