We are delighted to announce that Sarah van Eyndhoven, the second McIntosh-Patterson PhD Scholar at the AMC, has very successfully passed her viva-voce examination with a recommendation of only minor corrections.
Sarah’s dissertation is entitled ‘Ane end to an auld song?’ Macro and Micro Perspectives on Written Scots in Correspondence during the Union of Parliaments Debates and was supervised by Dr Warren Maguire (Edinburgh), Dr Alasdair Raffe (Edinburgh) and Dr Lynn Clark (Canterbury, NZ). Her examiners were Dr Pavel Iosad (Edinburgh) and Professor Joanna Kopaczyk (Glasgow).
Throughout her PhD, Sarah built a bespoke corpus for an understudied, complex period in the history of Scots (1689-1707) which she proceeded to analyse using statistical and historical sociolinguistic methods. The results show a detailed, nuanced view of the indexical and enregistered roles that Scots played at a time of shifting identities and allegiances within Scotland.
Sarah has been a very important member of the academic community at the AMC, Edinburgh and beyond, tutoring, lecturing, helping to organise a number of events (Scots@ed, Language in Context seminar series, Standards workshop at ICEHL23) and actively publishing all along the way. We are particularly proud of her achievements given the difficulties and inevitable delays which her doctoral work underwent due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Best of luck in all things to come, Dr. van Eyndhoven!