In 2020 the College elected for the first time a Senior Research Fellow in Linguistics—Miriam Meyerhoff. A sociolinguist, she investigates the sociolinguistic constraints on variation, principally in communities characterised by language or dialect contact. Other Fellows with interests in sociolinguistics include anthropologist David Parkin (Emeritus Fellow) and classicist Alex Mullen (Fifty Pound Fellow).

Other Fellows have interests that overlap with or border on other areas of Linguistics. Some are philosophers: Senior Research Fellows Susanne Bobzien and Ian Rumfitt (both of whose interests include the philosophy of language). Others are classicists: Senior Research Fellow Lucia Prauscello’s interests include philology; Emeritus Fellow James Adams works on the linguistic history of varieties of Latin. Diwakar Acharya, Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics, is a specialist of Sanskrit and other old Indic languages. Cecilia Heyes, a Senior Research Fellow in Theoretical Life Sciences, works on topics relevant to the evolution of language. Among the College’s Modern Linguists, Senior Research Fellow Neil Kenny has worked on the use of tense-aspect forms. Other Fellows whose work involves direct engagement with linguistic questions can be found on the ‘Classical Studies’, ‘History’, ‘Literature’, ‘Oriental Studies’, and ‘Social Anthropology’ pages.

Current Fellows:

• Professor Miriam Meyerhoff
• Dr Alex Mullen
• Professor Ian Rumfitt

Emeritus Fellows: 

• Professor David Parkin