Michele Bianconi studied Classics (BA) and Classical Philology and Ancient History (MA) in Pisa, and General Linguistics and Comparative Philology (D.Phil.) at Oxford. Before taking up his current post, he was postdoctoral researcher at the Università per Stranieri di Siena (2020-1), Stipendiary Lecturer in Classics at St Hilda's College (2020) and tutor at the Faculties of Classics, Linguistics, and Oriental Studies at Oxford (2016-9). In 2021-2 he was a Fellow in Hellenic Studies at Harvard's Centre for Hellenic Studies, and in 2020-2 a Lecturer in Classics at St Hilda's College, Oxford. Between 2021 and 2023 he was the Diebold Researcher in Comparative Philology. In 2025, he will be a Fellow at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles.
Michele's field of research, which is part of 'Indo-European Studies', lies at the intersection between Classics, Linguistics, and Near-Eastern studies. His D.Phil. dissertation was on the linguistic relationships between Ancient Greek and the Anatolian languages between the second and first millennia BCE. He has written papers and given talks on Greek, Anatolian and Latin linguistics, on Indo-European reconstruction, and on specific topics in other ancient Indo-European languages. He currently leads the Ancient Anatolia Network at TORCH and is the P.I. of the John-Fell-Funded project "Uncovering Messapic Texts".
Michele teaches Indo-European comparative linguistics, General Linguistics, and Greek and Latin linguistics, and has taught literature tutorials, language classes, and reading classes for the undergraduate courses in Classics. He also teaches Hittite and other "minor" Anatolian languages (Luwian, Lycian, Carian) at the postgraduate level.
Selected recent publications
2024. Le mot carien pour ‘chef’, une nouvelle racine anatolienne, et un changement phonétique carien-grec, «Kadmos» 63(1/2): 59-78.
2023. The Ancient Greek datives in -essi: contact or independent innovations?, «Transactions of the Philological Society» 121/3: 357-381. [with M. Capano].
2023. The Typology of contact-induced change in morphosyntax, special issue of the Transactions of the Philological Society. [ed. with R. Meyer]
2023. Homo homini lupus: Anatolian Echoes of Indo-European Ideology, in L. Massetti (ed.), Castalia: Studies in Indo-European Linguistics, Mythology, and Poetics, Leiden: Brill: 26-52.
2023. The survival of the optative in New Testament Greek «Journal of Greek Linguistics» 23: 36-78. [with E. Magni]
2022. A New Look at Phrygian Metre, in D.M. Goldstein – S.W. Jamison – B. Vine (eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, Hamburg: Buske: 1-19.
2022. The etymology of Gerga and the Carian word for ‘white’, «Historische Sprachforschung» 133: 27-42.
2022. Ancient Indo-European Languages between Linguistics and Philology: Contact, Variation, and Reconstruction, Leiden/Boston: Brill. [ed. with M. Capano et al.]
2021. There and Back Again: a Hundred Years of Graeco-Anatolian Comparative Linguistics, in M. Bianconi (ed.), Linguistic and Cultural Interactions between Greece and Anatolia: in Search of the Golden Fleece, Leiden/Boston: Brill: 8-39.
2021. Linguistic and Cultural Interactions between Greece and Anatolia: in Search of the Golden Fleece, Leiden/Boston: Brill. [ed.]
2020. Some thoughts on Anatolian Lexicon in Mycenaean Greek, in R. Garnier (ed.), Loanwords and Substrata, Innsbruck: Institut für Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck: 63-88.