Congratulations to Professors Asifa Majid, Miriam Meyerhoff, and Philomen Probert!
We are thrilled to share the news that our colleagues Asifa Majid, Miriam Meyerhoff, and Philomen Probert have been elected as Fellows of the British Academy. This award is one of the highest honours given to UK-based scholars in the humanities and social sciences.
Asifa Majid is Professor of Psychology and a fellow of St Hugh’s College, and also a member of our faculty. She is an expert in the relation between language, cognition, and perception, including ground-breaking research on the relation between language and smell. Her work covers a diverse array of languages, cultures, and methods, ranging from linguistics to genetics.
Asifa has received many major grants to support her research, and she has been recognised with many awards. Her long list of publications includes recent articles in such diverse outlets as Language and Current Biology. She spent much of her career in the Netherlands, based at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University. She took her current position in Oxford in 2022, and spent the 2022-2023 academic year as a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.
In addition to her many scientific accomplishments, Asifa has a long history of serving the field and bringing language science to much broader audiences. Asifa is the main language expert among the editors of Science Magazine. She regularly represents the field in public events, broad media, and podcasts. Earlier this year she received the Cognitive Science Society’s Elman Price for Scientific Achievement and Community Building. Asifa is a wonderful recent addition to Oxford’s language community, and we are excited to work with her to strengthen cross-division partnerships in the coming years.
Miriam Meyerhoff is Professor of Sociolinguistics and a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College. She is an expert in sociolinguistic variation and change, creoles, language and gender, and Pacific languages, especially the languages of Vanuatu. Creoles provide an especially valuable window on language variation, due to their lack of standardisation, which creates opportunities to observe lots of variation across all levels of linguistic structure.
Miriam is the author of many articles that span all areas of sociolinguistics and all areas of the world, together with textbooks and handbooks that have introduced many thousands of students to the field. Her career has taken her around the world, holding positions in two universities each in New Zealand, the US, and the UK.
Since moving to Oxford at the inauspicious time of 2020, Miriam has become an important figure in the Oxford language community, as a collaborator, mentor, or sounding board for countless students and faculty, in addition to helping out in many committees and other roles. All of this goes above and beyond the remit of her All Souls fellowship. We are so lucky to have Miriam with us in Oxford.
Photography credit: David Jeffrey
Philomen Probert is Professor of Classical Philology and Linguistics and a fellow of Wolfson College. She has broad interests in ancient Greek, Latin, and Anatolian languages and literature, comparative Indo-European philology, theoretical linguistics, the Graeco-Roman grammatical tradition, and methodology in historical linguistics. She exercises these interests in ways that enable her to build up a great depth of knowledge on certain subjects (favourite subjects include relative clauses and prosody, or the tune and rhythm or speech), to explore these from multiple angles, and to keep learning new skills.
Philomen has written 5 books, most recently the co-authored Ancient and Medieval Thought on Greek Enclitics (OUP, 2023), and many shorter pieces. She has given many invited lectures, most recently a series of talks at UCLA in spring 2024. She is also a tireless promoter of interest in the ancient Mediterranean world and its languages, with activities ranging from Roman arithmetic workshops to demos of Linear B for school groups. Philomen has made enormous contributions to Oxford since her appointment in 1999, including a term as Acting President of Wolfson College, and most recently a term as our tireless Faculty Board Chair.
We know that Philomen is not one to rest on her laurels. But this new honour clearly brings new laurels, and we hope that she will get a well-earned change of pace as she looks forward to spending next academic year in Munich and Paris.
These new awards bring to 11 the number of fellows in the BA’s Linguistics and Philology section who are based at the University of Oxford. You can find them all here.
