Congratulations to Dr Katherine McDonald - Philip Leverhulme Prize winner 2024

We are delighted to celebrate the recent success of Dr Katherine McDonald in the Philip Leverhulme Prize for 2024. 

The prize is awarded to 'researchers at an early stage of their careers whose work has had international impact and whose future research career is exceptionally promising' (Philip Leverhulme Prizes | The Leverhulme Trust)

Dr McDonald intends to spend the prize money kick-starting a major new research project called 'The Linguistics of Roman Slavery'. In this project, she will investigate enslaved people in the Roman Empire as second-language learners of Latin, using inscriptions, literary sources and comparative histories. Although slaves were one of the biggest migrant groups in ancient Italy, their spoken language has never been considered before as a fundamental part of their experience of slavery. This project will centre the lived experience of the millions of people who were trafficked into Roman Italy, leaving their communities and their mother tongues behind.

Photo credit Dr Christopher Haddad

Katherine McDonald studied at the University of Cambridge, and worked at as a Junior Research Fellow at Cambridge and a Senior Lecturer at Exeter before coming to Durham University in 2021, where she teaches Classics and Ancient History. Her research fields include the languages of ancient Italy (including Oscan, Etruscan, Umbrian, Venetic, Latin and Greek), personal names, and epigraphy. She is particularly interested in the history of multilingualism, migration, language contact and gender linguistics.