Classics, Ancient History, Linguistics, Academia and more
This week, a lot of us who teach Classical Philology and Linguistics at Cambridge have been teaching our first essay of the first year course on the sounds of Greek and Latin. I had a request from a student for a good example of the difference between long and short alpha, which really stumped me for a... Continue Reading →
My very clever colleague Matt is having his viva today (good luck Matt!), and he posted this Indo-European cartoon to illustrate the occasion. (Killing a dragon is of course the linguists' version of the famous viva "snake fight", just FYI.) You can see more of Christina Skelton's great cartoons on Linear B and Indo-European over... Continue Reading →
Fairly regularly, someone will ask me: was there Oscan (or Venetic or Etruscan or South Picene) literature? Or, sometimes a bit more aggressively, someone asserts that there definitely wasn’t an Oscan literary culture and therefore that Oscan-speakers and their societies were just less advanced than the Greeks and/or Romans. It's not that I think this... Continue Reading →
I am very pleased to announce officially that I will be joining the University of Exeter from September 2016 as a Lecturer in Classics. I'm thrilled to be joining such a great department, where I'll be working with scholars whose work I admire very much. Already everyone has been incredibly friendly and welcoming, and we already... Continue Reading →
I'm very excited to announce the launch of the new Cambridge Greek Play website! The new website is not just the place for finding out about the new productions of Antigone and Lysistrata in 2016 (which you can also find out about via @camgreekplay). It's also meant as an archive of past productions - you... Continue Reading →
This Wednesday at 4.30 I'll be speaking about my new work at the Cambridge Indo-European Seminar, also known as the Philology and Linguistics Seminar. All are welcome, especially for a cup of tea at 4.15 and a drink in the pub afterwards. You can find the room details here. If you're interested, you can also download... Continue Reading →
The Cambridge Festival of Ideas rolls around again this week, with lots of great events to get involved with, including a lot of events in the Classics Faculty. As always, the Greek in Italy project has made a couple of contributions. Geoff's talk "Did Language Matter? Local Versus Imperial Languages in Classical Antiquity" has already sold... Continue Reading →
I'm not a skilled baker myself, but I highly appreciate baking excellence in others, particularly in the form of the Great British Bake Off. Tonight is, of course, this year's final (I'll be cheering for Nadiya), so it seems the perfect opportunity to plug some of my favourite Classics, archaeology and linguistics themed show-stoppers. Firstly... Continue Reading →
A great post here on the new Samnite grave in Pompeii by Virginia L. Campbell. She's also posted about the Oscan epigraphy of Pompeii here. A new discovery at Pompeii is always an exciting event, and even more so when it's from the 'Samnite' period of the town rather than its final destruction. I'm looking... Continue Reading →
I'm very excited to announce the publication of my book Oscan in Southern Italy and Sicily. The editor very kindly dropped the first copy round to my house last night, and I'm really pleased with how it has turned out. This book started life as my PhD thesis (pictures of its journey from thesis to book... Continue Reading →
Katherine McDonald 