About Me

I am Director of Studies for Linguistics at St Catz and one of the French tutors here, whilst I also hold a Professorship of French and Romance Linguistics at University-level. I have a particular interest in access and outreach work, having been involved with both the French and Linguistics UNIQ courses at Oxford and having coordinated a national project to improve the number of care-leavers accessing Higher Education.

Teaching

I love teaching and cover a broad range of courses within the Oxford Medieval and Modern Languages and Linguistics degrees. These include French language and linguistics at all levels, comparative Romance linguistics, historical linguistics, Italo-Romance linguistics and formal syntax. I also teach the general linguistics course both at Prelims and FHS level for St Catherine’s and St John’s.

I am always keen to hear from prospective graduate students working on topics within synchronic or diachronic Romance morphosyntax as well as general topics within historical linguistics, formal syntax and French linguistics.

Research

The main focus of my research is on French and Gallo-Romance, though I have also published on the syntax of other Romance varieties. I am currently writing a monograph entitled Syntactic Change in French and co-editing a volume on connections between Germanic and Romance languages alongside a handbook-style treatment of the Verb Second property, entitled Rethinking Verb Second. A monograph on word order in Medieval Romance languages has recently appeared with OUP, entitled Verb Second in Medieval Romance.

Faculty webpage