We are delighted to announce that the latest McIntosh-Patterson was awarded this summer — after stiff competition — to Jack Heitman. This is a three-year stipend and full-fees scholarship to be conducted under the auspices of the AMC.
Jack is a linguistics student from Colorado in the United States. After completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Denver and further affiliate undergraduate work in Linguistics at the University of Colorado, he completed an MSc by Research in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Pavel Iosad and John Joseph. His thesis was titled, The Community-Gender Model of British Latin Shift, which is currently being peer-reviewed as an article for the journal NOWELE.
As a PhD candidate, he will be continuing his investigation of the post-Roman period of Britain, specifically creating a historical sociolinguistic review of the 4-6th centuries across Britain and Ireland. Reconciling the latest cross-disciplinary evidence and leveraging groundbreaking techniques in historical sociolinguistics, he aims to create models of language shift to account for the regional-linguistic boundaries that take shape through and after the early Dark Ages.
This is a novel undertaking for post-Roman Britain, and it will help us understand key unknowns in early British history that have long eluded linguists and historians alike, including the fate of British Latin which is considered “one of the most vexing problems of the languages of early Britain” (Miller, 2012, p.25). Not only will this project leverage the expertise of researchers in the AMC, but it is also a cross-institutional endeavour, being supervised by Pavel Iosad (Edinburgh), Warren Maguire (Edinburgh), and Alex Woolf (St Andrews).
We are very excited to have Jack among us and wish him all the best in his academic undertakings!
