Guido Seiler is Professor of Germanic Philology in the German Department of the University of Zurich, and, since 2021, also Head of the Zurich Centre for Linguistics (LiZZ). Prior to taking up these positions, Guido Seiler was Professor of German Linguistics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (2014-2019) and the University of Freiburg, Germany (2009-2014). From 2008-2009 he held a lectureship in German Linguistics at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. 

Guido Seiler obtained his doctoral and postdoctoral degrees at the University of Zurich. He was a postdoctoral visiting scholar at the universities of Stanford (2003-2004) and Konstanz (2006-2007). His doctoral and postdoctoral work was awarded a Johann-Andreas-Schmeller Prize and a UBS-Habilitation Prize, respectively. Guido Seiler’s expertise is in German, especially Swiss German dialects, historical linguistics, and language contact. He takes a particular interest in investigating linguistic features of Swiss German dialects, their geographical distribution, and evolution. Besides publishing widely on these areas, he has undertaken major SNSF-funded research projects such as Dialect syntax of Swiss German (as a postdoctoral researcher) and most recently, SHWITZER: Amish Shwitzer as a mixed language with closely related parents (as Principal Investigator), in which he investigates how dialect variation can be used to advance linguistic theory, theories of language change, grammatical structure, and language contact. His empirical research on varieties of German is part of a broader interest in furthering and refining the existing theoretical standpoints and accounts with regard to general linguistics.