She studied Slavic and German Studies at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan and at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. From 2002 to 2005 she was a research assistant in Mainz and completed her doctorate there. In 2006, she worked as a research assistant in Mainz and at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, in the project Grammar of German in European Comparison. In October 2006, she became junior professor for historical linguistics of German in Mainz. From 2009 to 2017, she held the professorship for Linguistics of German with a focus on historical linguistics at the University of Hamburg. In 2017, she accepted the call to the Chair of German Linguistics at the University of Bamberg and moved to the Chair of Historical Linguistics of German at the University of Leipzig on 1 April 2022.