Kersti Börjars has degrees from Uppsala University (Filosofie Kandidat), the University of Leiden (Doctorandus) and a PhD from the University of Manchester.

Her academic field is linguistics, especially syntactic theory and linguistic change. In this area, she has published on Germanic languages, but also more general papers.

Kersti joined St Catherine’s College from the University of Manchester in January 2020. She was appointed as a Lecturer in Linguistics there in 1994, and promoted to Professor in 2002.

She was appointed Associate Dean for Undergraduate Affairs in the newly formed Faculty of Humanities in January 2004 and remained in this role until January 2008. She was Head of School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures from 2009 until 2012. From 2012 until she left the University of Manchester, she was Associate Vice-President for Teaching, Learning and Students.

In 2002, she held she was a visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg for six months and from 2017 she had a three-year appointment as Professor II of Nordic Languages at Oslo University.

Kersti was the President of The Linguistics Association of Great Britain from 2005 until 2011. She was a member of the RAE 2008 panel 58 for linguistics and was Chair of sub-panel 28 ‘Modern languages and linguistics’ of REF2014. She is one of the editors of the Journal of Linguistics.

Photograph of the Master in the SCR Corridor at St Catherine's College