I'm pleased to announce that I'll be speaking at the upcoming Roman Archaeology Conference in March 2016, to be held at ‘Sapienza’ Università di Roma and the British School at Rome. The Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference will be held at the same time. For now, the RAC website is a little sparse, but you can... Continue Reading →
Blog
Oscan in Early Modern Italy
One of my favourite things about studying an unusual language is that your research is very memorable. Once people associate you with a particular obscure language, they will immediately think of you whenever they hear about it elsewhere. And - even better - they will send you sources that you never could have found otherwise.... Continue Reading →
Review: Communication and Materiality
Here's my "Classics for All" review of Communitcation and Materiality: Written and Unwritten Communication in pre-Modern Societies. If you'd like to read the book, or selected chapters from it, you can currently download it for free from the De Gruyter website. Mostly a very good read, which introduced me to a lot of sources I wasn't familiar with... Continue Reading →
The problem with long alpha
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 →
Linguistics Cartoons to Bring You Luck on Friday 13th
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 →
Was there non-Roman literature in Ancient Italy?
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 →
My New Job at the University of Exeter
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 →
Cambridge Greek Play Website Launch
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 →
Inter-city competition in the Veneto @ the Cambridge Indo-European Seminar
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 →
Greek in Italy at the Festival of Ideas and the Fitzwilliam Museum
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 →
