She studied Romance linguistics at the University of Bonn, the University of Poitiers and the University of Freiburg, working with Wolfgang Raible and Annegret Bolléest She received her Doctor of Philosophy thesis with a work on complex syntax in Seychelles Creole (Michaelis 1994), and she also worked on tense and aspect in Seychelles Creole, challenging Derek Bickerton"s language bioprogram hypothesis.
She was previously at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena. Between 1991 and 1998 she was an assistant professor at the University of Bamberg. In more recent work, she has focused on the role of substrate languages in creole genesis (eg Michaelis 2008).
Michaelis is best known for coordinating and coediting the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures (2013).
