Biography

Ancient languages are no less fluid than their contemporary equivalents: obscured by the standardisation of most classical texts, the vernaculars of antiquity vary dramatically across time and space, evolving unpredictably and spreading into new regions. My interest in the development of, and interactions between, ancient languages was piqued while studying Latin and Classical Greek at the University of Sydney, and furthered by my graduate studies of Classical Arabic at Charles Sturt University. Through my Master of Philosophy at Cambridge, I researched how language change affected Greek poetic composition, and how Greek and Latin interacted with regional Semitic languages, including Arabic and Ge'ez. I intend to focus my PhD on a particular issue in the diachronic linguistics of Greek: the loss of phonemic accentual pitch, and the development of the modern 'stress' accent. Little explored in modern scholarship, this question is not only important to Greek linguistics, but also informs our understanding of metrical composition in Late Antiquity, and the interchange of linguistic features occurring across Greek's areal spread. I am most grateful to the Gates Cambridge Trust for continuing to support my research.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge Classics 2020
Charles Sturt University Islamic Studies 2019
University of Sydney Arabic Language and Cultures 2018