Philip Leverhulme Prize

I’m very honoured to have been named among the winners of the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Classics this year. Not only am I in amazing company on a list of great Classicists in the UK, but I am extremely excited to kick-start a new project using the money awarded by the Leverhulme Trust.

From 2025, I’ll be starting work on a project entitled ‘The Linguistics of Roman Slavery’, looking at enslaved people as migrants and language learners in the Roman Empire. Slaves were a highly mobile group, many of whom had to learn Latin for the first time when they were brought into Italy, but they have rarely been studied from this perspective. I’m hoping that three years of research on the languages of slavery will at least start to do this topic justice – and will provide some new opportunities for blogging about research as well.

With the demise of Twitter, you can find me over on Bluesky, along with many other excellent Classicists and linguists.