Rate My Professor James Clackson

Professor James Clackson is Professor of Comparative Philology in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge. He holds an MA and PhD from the University of Cambridge. He has been a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, since 1998 and Director of Studies in Classics since 1999. His research specializations encompass the history of the Latin and Greek languages, ancient sociolinguistics and bilingualism, languages and epigraphy of the ancient Mediterranean, comparative Indo-European studies, historical sociolinguistics of Latin, ancient languages of the Italian peninsula especially Sabellian and Etruscan, and the history of the Armenian language. Clackson is Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project ‘Greek in Italy’. He supervises graduate research on topics including the verbal system development in Indo-European dialects, language interaction between Latin, Greek, and Gaulish, the Oscan language in southern Italy, Greek borrowings in Etruscan, and language registers in ancient Greek literature.

Clackson’s key publications include Language and Society in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Cambridge University Press, 2015), A Companion to the Latin Language (editor, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2007), The Blackwell History of the Latin Language (with Geoff Horrocks, Oxford University Press, 2007), Monastic Estates in Late Antique and Early Islamic Egypt (editor with others, American Society of Papyrologists, 2009), Indo-European Word Formation (editor with Birgit Anette Olsen, Copenhagen, 2004), Nominal Composition in Indo-European Languages (editor with Torsten Meißner, Transactions of the Philological Society, 2002), and The Linguistic Relationship between Armenian and Greek (Oxford University Press, 1994). He was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2001 and serves as Editor of Transactions of the Philological Society, the oldest scholarly journal devoted to the study of language and languages. His scholarship has been cited more than 2,800 times.