Rate My Professor Josh Brown

Dr Josh Brown is Associate Professor in Italian Studies and Chair of Modern European Languages in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Australia. He earned his PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Western Australia in 2011 with a thesis on early evidence for Tuscanisation in the letters of Milanese merchants in the Datini Archive, Prato, 1396-1402. Brown also holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) and Bachelor of Economics from the same institution in 2007, and a Zertifikat Deutsch in 2003. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) and an elected fellow of the Associazione per la storia della lingua italiana. His career includes a postdoctoral fellowship at Stockholm University, teaching positions at the Australian National University where he served as stream leader for historical sociolinguistics at the Centre for Research on Language Change, and Acting Deputy Head of the School of Humanities at UWA. In 2025-2026, he holds the Australian European University Institute Fellowship, based at the European University Institute in early 2026.

Brown's research as a historical sociolinguist examines language change in the history of standard Italian and Gallo-Italian varieties, historical multilingualism in the Italian peninsula, language and dialect contact, and language ideology in the Early Modern Period, drawing on unpublished archival manuscripts for linguistic variation studies. Key publications include the co-edited volume Languages and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in Renaissance Italy (Brepols, with Alessandra Petrocchi), the edited special issue of Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics on merchants in language standardisation (with Anita Auer), Dialect Levelling and Merchant Writing in Renaissance Italy (2024), Lingua Francas as Evidence of Standard Language Ideology in Historical Perspective (2024), Intra-Writer Variation and Linguistic Accommodation in the Letters (1397-1402) of the Milanese Merchant Giovanni da Pessano to the Datini Network (2023), and Historical Linguistics and Italian at University (2023). Forthcoming works feature Multilingual Merchant Writing in Renaissance Italy (2027, Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics) and A Speaker-Centered Approach to Mediterranean Lingua Franca (2026). He has produced 66 research outputs, including 27 articles and 11 chapters. Brown serves on the editorial board of La lingua italiana: storia, strutture, testi, as Treasurer of the Languages and Cultures Network for Australian Universities, and Director of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies.