• Language history
• Philology
• Historical sociolinguistics
• Language variation and change
• Romance linguistics
• Language contact
• Language pedagogy

I am a historical sociolinguist. After completing my PhD in history of the Italian language, I held a two-year position as Cassamarca Assistant Professor in Italian at The University of Western Australia. My first book looks at early evidence for tuscanisation in non-literary texts sent from Milan in the late fourteenth century. I was lucky enough to make use of documents in the Datini Archive, Prato whose more than 150,000 documents are almost all available for viewing online. A second, co-authored book, provides a study of the nearly 200 extant letters held in the New Norcia Archive and written by an Italian priest in colonial Western Australia. In addition to the history of the Italian language, my research interests have widened to include broader questions of dialect contact, language change, and koineization using tools from Digital Humanities.

From 2016-17, I was a postdoctoral fellow in Italian Studies at Romanska och klassiska institutionen, Stockholm University, Sweden. I took up my position in Italian at ANU in 2018. I am the Convenor for the Italian Studies program, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a member of the Outreach and Engagement Reference Group in the School of Literature, Linguistics and Languages. I am an affiliate of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language and the ANU Centre for Digital Humanities Research. I am the stream leader for historical sociolinguistics at ANU’s Centre for Research on Language Change, and an active member of the Anglo-Saxon reading group on Thursdays during term time.

You can hear more about me and my research here and watch a short video here.

1) Koineization in Renaissance Italy

The focus of my current project is on the historical formation of ‘common’ or koine languages, and their interaction with standard languages. In particular, I am interested in how different grammars react to each other and form a common language when different dialects are brought together by processes of (relatively quick) migration. This situation arises often in historical contexts, and is particularly prevalent in late medieval Italy. I am currently writing a volume which investigates these microlevel dynamics in the letters of a nun from fifteenth-century Milan, Margherita Lambertenghi. Using freshly discovered archival materials from the Archivio di Stato in Milan, focus is placed on the role of women’s writing in Renaissance Italy and how a linguistic analysis of this writing can help us understand language change. Margherita’s letters contain evidence of a form of non-literary Milanese that is so far undocumented in the literature and has been understudied. Due to an extreme lack of documents from Milan during the fifteenth century, her writing contains precious insights to the broader forms of language mixing that was part of an ongoing process.

2) Languages of Renaissance Italy (with Dr Alessandra Petrocchi, University of Oxford)

This unique volume represents the first-ever collection of essays that deal with multiple types of language contact and cross-cultural exchanges in and with respect to Renaissance Italy (1300 to 1600). The contributions span a wide variety of topics, including the development of the Italian language from Latin, early Italian vernaculars, cross-linguistic and cultural exchanges with the Mediterranean regions (thus with Hebrew, Arabic, and Byzantine Greek primary sources) and European countries (Spanish, French, German, Dutch, and Middle English primary sources). The volume employs comparative methods, cross-linguistic research, and investigates interdisciplinary topics. It takes a fresh approach to the history of late medieval and early modern Italy by focusing on East/West linguistic and cultural encounters, transmission of ideas and texts, multilingualism in literature (various genres and various forms of multilingualism), translation practices, reception/adaptation, transculturalism and literary exchanges, and the relationship between languages and language varieties. It aims to provide a comprehensive picture of a truly global Renaissance Italy where languages, textual traditions, and systems of knowledge from different geographical areas either combined or clashed. This volume is due for publication with Brepols in 2021.

Proposals are welcome for Honours, MPhil, and PhD research in any of the areas listed in the research interests section above. 

Associate Supervisor

The diachrony of definiteness in Syriac (PhD, 2020-ongoing)

Exploring teacher perceptions of assessment in languages: The French Language Progression Framework K-10 (MPhil, 2019 - ongoing)

Primary Supervisor

Persistence and Innovation of the -isc- Inchoative Infix in Three Dictionaries Concerning Infinitive Forms in Southern Calabrian Dialects (2020, Honours)

Associate Supervisor

Exploring the migrant in Italian cinema: the case of Marco Tullio Giordana’s Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti and Cristina Comencini’s Bianco e nero  (2011, Honours)