In Profile: Lidia Becker

“Sorry about the mess — they’re renovating,” Becker says, pulling aside protective plastic sheeting at the entrance to her office. Inside, the dust of the hallway disappears. The room is tidy and welcoming, overlooking the gray November streets near Mannheim’s train station. Two moving boxes still stand in the corner, reminders that she arrived only recently, in spring 2025, when she accepted a professorship at the Department of Romance Studies. She laughs when she notices them. “Yes, they’re still here. But I already feel completely settled in Mannheim.” For her family as well, she says, the move feels right: her husband grew up in the nearby Palatinate region.

An Italian turning point

How she got here? Becker begins her story calmly, but with an energy that brings each memory vividly to life. She talks about Russia, her home, where she grew up as Lidia Kouznetsova, about her childhood and youth in Voronezh, a region near the Russian-Ukrainian border where her parents still live — visits have since become impossible. “By the time I was ten or eleven, I already knew languages were my passion,” she says. “At first, I dreamed of becoming a writer: I wrote short stories and submitted them to children’s magazines. Soon after, I discovered English and found myself a private tutor.” As civil engineers, her parents could afford the lessons and supported their daughter’s passion unconditionally.

“I was incredibly lucky with my parents,” Becker, 45, says gratefully. “The humanities weren’t their field at all, but they saw how much I loved it — and they never held me back.” A defining moment came at age fifteen. As a gesture of postwar reconciliation, the Italian military — which had occupied her home region during World War II — sponsored youth trips to Italy. Becker traveled to Milan, Venice, Rome, Florence — her first encounter with Western Europe left a lasting impression. “It was my first contact with Romance languages, of course, and I was completely taken with Italian,” she says. “That trip made me realize: languages open the world to me, that’s what I want to study.”

Becoming a scholar

Italian was not offered at the local public university in Voronezh, so she enrolled in Spanish, partly because it would allow her to learn other Romance languages such as Italian and Portuguese. After her graduation in Russia, she moved to Germany on a student visa to pursue a German degree at the University of Mainz. Those early months were challenging, she says. To gain admission, she had to pass a demanding German language exam. “As much as I love languages — after only one year of learning German, that was really tough,” she recalls with a groan. She barely passed.

She went on to study Romance philology, classical philology, and classical archaeology, and later completed her doctorate in Romance linguistics in Trier. Thanks to a state graduate scholarship, she was able to devote the second half of her four-year doctoral project entirely to research and ultimately published a 1,166-page dictionary of medieval personal names on the Iberian Peninsula. Becker jumps to her feet and pulls the massive volume from her bookshelf to demonstrate. Weighing the book in her hands, she makes another point: “I didn’t grow up knowing what an academic career was. I had no role models. And in Russia, the pay in the humanities was terrible.”

During her time in Mainz, however, something changed: for the first time, a career in academia began to seem like a real possibility. Her first courses in German represented another turning point. Becker still sounds enthusiastic when describing them. “I was fascinated by the culture of critical thinking at universities here. Professors did not lecture, they actually talked with us, wanted discussion, treated students as equals — they even wanted to learn from us.”

A fascination for multilingualism

Mainz shaped her career ambitions; Trier shaped her research profile. While her dissertation focused on historical linguistics, she simultaneously discovered sociolinguistics and began a habilitation project on Romance regional languages and their standardization. Having grown up in a border region and later immigrated herself, she developed multilingualism and its social implications into a central research focus.

Since 2022 she has conducted annual fieldwork at the border of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay — a project especially close to her heart. “We listen to people in everyday situations,” she explains. “We travel in small research groups and immerse ourselves in real life, documenting how multilingualism actually works there.”

The region confronts researchers with difficult realities — drug trafficking, smuggling, poverty, hunger — yet these experiences also motivate her work. “For me, linguistics is part of the humanities and social sciences,” Becker says. “It can help reveal and address social problems.”

Showing what’s possible

In 2010, one week before the birth of her first son, Becker applied for a junior professorship in Hanover. Six months later she was invited to give a trial lecture, received the offer — and the young family moved. Balancing an academic career and children? “It worked because my husband handled most of the childcare,” she says. The couple now has two sons, both attending school in Mannheim. Next year they may even join her for field research in Argentina.

Becker sometimes pauses to consider how far she has come—living in a foreign country, a professor holding her own chair. It’s not something she takes for granted. She also sees her journey very much as a story of migration. “I hope I can give my female students — especially those whose families come from other countries — hope and encouragement,” she says. “I know how hard it is. You hesitate to speak up or even say anything at all because you’ve internalized prejudice and put-downs. Maybe I can serve as a role model.”

Text: Jule Leger / April 2026