Manfred Markus

Manfred Markus (born 15 February 1941 in Hagen, Germany), is a German-Austrian linguist and university professor. Education and career From 1960 to 1967, Markus studied philosophy, pedagogy, English, and German at the universities of Heidelberg, Reading (1962-1963), and Göttingen. After attaining his M.A., he moved to the University of Regensburg, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1970 and was awarded his Habilitation in 1980. From 1974 to 1975 he was Visiting associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. In 1981 he was appointed chairholder as a full professor of English linguistics and mediaeval English literature at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and has been a professor emeritus since 2009. He was head of the English Department there from 1985 to 1995 and from 2005 to 2007. Markus was visiting professor and guest lecturer at several international universities (in the US, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Finland, Japan, Austria, and Czech Republic). Markus is (co-) author or (co-) editor of 21 scholarly books and over 100 articles. He was also co-editor of the book series Austrian Studies in English (formerly Wiener Beiträge zur Philologie). His edition and translation of the Middle English Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into German (1974; 4th ed. 2009) has as yet remained the only German edition of this text. With a background in English and American literary studies, Markus after 1975 focused on linguistics, both synchronic and diachronic. He became widely known as the director of ICAMET (the Innsbruck Computer Archive of Machine-Readable English Texts), with the two historical text corpora Innsbruck English Letters 1386-1698 and Innsbruck Middle English Prose on his record as compiler. His main achievement as a corpus linguist, however, is the creation of an online version of Joseph Wright's comprehensive English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905), EDD Online, which, by its sophisticated software, allows for an access to English dialects worldwide from 1700 to 1903. Markus continued to be director of the EDD Online project, initiated by him in 2005, until its completion in 2022.