About

I’m a linguist and philologist specialized in the earlier history of the Germanic languages, including Old and Middle English, Old Norse, Gothic, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and Old High German. I currently hold a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship to research Norse Influence on Middle English Prosody. Based on this work, I am preparing a book manuscript synthesizing the phonological and metrical evidence for foot structure in medieval English and Old Norse.

I maintain a broad interest in what used to be called Germanic comparative philology, including the phonological and morphological development of the Germanic languages from Proto-Indo-European. This field combines close attention to ancient and medieval texts as the primary sources for information about older languages, and a grounding in the typology of languages around the world and current thinking about the possibilities and constraints concerning how languages and Language in general work. My ongoing blog series The History of the English Language in A Hundred Words aims to bring the full history of English, from its earliest reconstructible prehistory to the present day, to a wider public in a readable and reliable way.