While being research assistant for Oriental Computational Linguistics in 1991, he habilitated at the University of Bamberg with his inaugural dissertation on the study of Iranian loanwords in Armenian and Georgian.

Since 2020 Gippert is the Senior Professor at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at the University of Hamburg[1] and the Head of the ERC funded project “The Development of Literacy in the Caucasian Territories (DeLiCaTe)“ hosted by the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at the University of Hamburg.

The project aims to show the development of specific alphabetic scripts in the context of Christianisation in the early 5th century CE meant the beginning of literacy for three distinct ethnic groups in the Caucasus: Georgians, Armenians and the so-called “Caucasian Albanians“.

[4] Its goal, since its foundation in 1987, has been the full digital accessibility of textually recorded material of various Indo-European and adjacent languages.

Since 2010, Gippert has been the head of the center “Digital Humanities in the State of Hesse: Integrated Processing and Analysis of Text-based Corpora” within the unit of the “Federal Offensive for the Development of Scientific and Economic Excellence” (LOEWE (project).