After she obtained her PhD at Groningen University in 1991, Henriette de Swart taught at Groningen University and Stanford University until she became a full professor in French linguistics and semantics at Utrecht University in 1997. Her research focuses on cross-linguistic variation in meaning. She published journal articles and books/book chapters on tense and aspect, negation, bare nominals and indefinites, as well as an introductory textbook in semantics. She also investigated the role of semantics in language evolution, and was closely involved in the development of bidirectional optimality theory. She was an associate editor of Natural Language and Linguistic Theory (2015-2018), was director of the national graduate school in linguistics (LOT) and the director of the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics (LOT). In 2013, she was elected as a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW). She teaches courses in the bachelor programme French language and culture, the bachelor programme Artificial Intelligence, and the research master Linguistics.