Dr Katherine McDonald from our Classics and Ancient History department has been awarded the prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize for the international impact of her research.
The prize is awarded to researchers at an early stage of their careers whose work has had international impact and whose future career is exceptionally promising.
Katherine was described by the Leverhulme Trust as 'an agenda-setting scholar within a complex and challenging field with an impressive trajectory of work'.
Roman slavery
The award will enable Katherine to kick-start a major new research project on the linguistics of Roman slavery.
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.
Millions of people who were trafficked into Roman Italy had to leave their communities and their mother tongues behind. The lived experience of these people will be central in the research.
Research career
Katherine joined Durham University in 2021 after studying and working at the University of Cambridge. 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.
